excerpts from Summer 2020 | 69.4

DAYNA PATTERSON

with translations by

ANACREON

ELIZABETH REES

DAN BEACHY-QUICK

ARCHILOCHUS

MARNI BERGER

LAURA MARRIS

JENNIFER BROWN

AISHA A. HARVEY

SOPHIE GRIMES

CALLIMACHUS

DANIEL SUTTER

TODD FOLEY

SUSAN COMNINOS

SEAN BERNARD

CHRIS DUBOSE

HOLLY HAWORTH

ALAIN JULES HIRWA

NANCY REISMAN

ADAM HOULE

SIMONIDES

PAOL KEINEG

The Carolina Quarterly

ALCMAN

SHENG KEYI

Vo l u m e 6 9 . 4 Summer 2020 VOLUME 69.4

PUBLISHED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

SUMMER 2020

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 R T H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L

Summer 2020

V O LU M E 69.4

ED ITO R - IN- C HIE F

Kylan Rice A S S IS TA NT EDITO R S

Eli Hardwig Bailey Fernandez F IC T IO N EDITO R S

Paul Blom Matthew Duncan P O E T RY ED ITO R

Calvin Olsen NO N- F IC T IO N ED I TO R

Jo Klevdal R E V IE W S EDITO R

Carly Schnitzler MA NAGING EDITO R

Evan Miles

M O R E O NLINE AT

www.thecarolinaquarterly.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS

ON THE COVER

The Carolina Quarterly publishes four issues per year (two print,

"Feet Don't Fail Me Now,"

by Madeline Rupard

two digital) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Subscription rates and payment information can be found on our website: thecarolinaquarterly.com.

BACK ISSUES & REPRINTS Current single issues are $12 each. Back issues are $8 each. Issues can be purchased on our website through PayPal, or by money order or check payable in U.S. funds.

COVER DESIGN Kylan Rice

READERS Kelly Copolo Laura Crook

SUBMISSIONS

Olivia Harris

The Carolina Quarterly welcomes submissions of unpublished

Katie Leonard

fiction, poetry, non-fiction, book reviews, and visual art. Only electronic

Grace Stroup

submissions are accepted through our online partner, Submittable.

Submissions are open year round. Please allow four to six months for a response.

Maxim Tsarev Kiran Wheeler Sarah White

INDEXING The Carolina Quarterly is indexed in the Book Review Index, Poem

INTERNS

Finder, Index to Periodical Fiction, American Humanities Index, and

Katie Leonard

the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Member Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. ISSN 0008-6797.

Library of Congress catalogue card number 52019435.

Blythe Gulley

BOOK REVIEWERS Bailey Fernandez Jessica Covil

Contents

Summer 2020 | VOLUME 69.4

POETRY JENNIFER BROWN

Obsessive 8

SUSAN COMNINOS

Unplotted 10

CHRIS DUBOSE

Sometimes I Fear 11

ALAIN JULES HIRWA

On My Relationship with Solitude 12

ADAM HOULE

Easy Bird 13 The Dressing Room Mirrors 14

DAYNA PAT TERSON

God the Mother Speaks with a Mouth of Ocean 15

ELIZABETH REES

Woman Reclining on a Porch 17 A Man is Coming 18

FICTION MARNI BERGER

Hurricane 19

AISHA A. HARVEY

The Coat of Many Coloreds 29

DANIEL SUT TER

Lucia 38

NON-FICTION SEAN BERNARD

That Old Picture on the Museum Wall is the World All Around Us; or, The Long Mulberr y Tree 51

HOLLY HAWORTH

How to Nourish 60

NANCY REISMAN

Waiting Rooms 62

T R A N S L AT I O N S FIVE GREEK LYRIC POETS trans. Dan Beachy-Quick

Alcman 3, fr. 1 68 Love’s Chore (Anacreon 15) 69 War-Tor n (Archiloch us 139) 71 Callimachus XLIII 72 Simonide s 519B 73

PAOL KEINEG trans. Laura Marris

The Eleventh Hour 75 Shakespear e and Co 76 A Port on the Mediterranean 77 Confession 78 Travelers 79

SHENG KEYI trans. Sophie Grimes & Todd Foley

Watermelons Taste Best When Stolen 80 Camera 82 We're Al l Unmoored 86

REVIEWS BAILEY FERNANDEZ

Sun Cycle by Anne Lesley Selcer 88

JESSICA COVIL

Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark 92

JENNIFER BROWN

Obsessive The fedora may be the last one, here, in this man's hands. He pinches the front of the crown, deepening its dimple, bends the brim around with concentration & absence at once, as though he has stood fifty years like this, a man planted by a streetlamp bus stop, waiting to meet someone who never came at all while he shaped & reshaped his hat, trying not to look up.

He might've leaned for hours, each second rounded by the lives of the ones before & after, florid with sirens or the banter of bellhops across the sidewalk, each shrinking the time he'd have to think of someone not arriving with the sorrowful eyes he'd try not to recall. The pliable felt curls in his hands, not warm or cold, grows softer under the quick, measured crimping. There is hope for the brim & crown, for a bending that will mold the felt to a perfection.

But he isn't looking for that moment when the work is done.

He will not stop then

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& replace the hat & draw up his shoulders to walk easy under a god's cap without memory, cleansed of the abstract clutter of longing. His eyes are focused inside & beyond, where we think they should be to learn what is more than visible, what lifts us out of our long selves— so exact is the demand of touch, of flesh, of the present, so elaborate our flight.

JENNIFER BROWN

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SUSAN COMNINOS

Unplotted after William Wordsworth’s “Nuns Fret Not” Within the sonnet’s scanty plot of ground someone sings off-tune. Someone’s plotted novel flips off-road. Someone’s plot to leave a neutral town—paved over, by shift in plot to a storied house, with trees. The plotted room —mute office in the wake of the plotted degree— unrented, undrawn, reverse-plotted. For sake of vinting, local-sourcing, ecopoverty—whatever the plot— instead plot what happens: backyards; gardens; cook -outs, camp; children’s freshly pillowed heads. Plot even the snipped poms of plotted stalks: roses rushing towards the dawn of the domestic plot— the rise of the plotted drowned, briefly shining in prosody’s time, before the freshly dug plot.

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MARNI BERGER

Hurricane “There was a hurricane,” my grandmother said, “in 1934.”

“Really?” I said. I didn’t believe anything then. I was ten years old, and skepticism was a freedom I’d recently discovered. A lovely one. But I was interested in a story I thought she might tell. One of adventure. One of fear. One of, well, hurricanes.

I worked the balance between coy and not. Disinterest and availability.

Grammy and I were sitting in a corner of my grandparents’ home, between a slanted wall and a large brick fireplace that separated the living room and dining room with a licking orange glow. The power was out. A storm had hit. Rain beat the windows. Somehow, we were the only two awake. Renting a sliver of time, together near the heat of the glow.

My mother, brothers, sister, and I had recently moved into their home because we’d left my stepfather’s home; my mother was divorcing him. And at a time like this, I needed all the distraction I could get.

“Yes,” she said. “Fallen trees, crushed homes, crushed people, crushed whole towns—whole worlds.”

We sipped our hot chocolates. “Huh,” I said. “Whole worlds.”

“Your grandfather almost died. He was five years old.”

“You don’t say.”

“It’s a scary story, so I want to know if you’re ready.”

“Well…” I wanted to remain the skeptic, so I tried to let her know, without letting her know, that I wanted to hear it, this wild story, in the pitch dark, just us two.

“Is it not almost Halloween?” I said. “Am I not a decade old?”

“You are,” she said. “And, it is.” She smiled and squeezed my leg.

The year was 1929.

Moments like these, nervous, she could hardly see in the dark, but she tried, pressing her forehead to the window glass. She knew that outside the window the horse was chewing on thick blocks of frozen snow. She knew because she could hear him, holding the ice between his teeth, dropping it, skidding his tongue across the cool surface of each cube where it lay in grass as stiff as spines, thin as glass, translucent and ready to snap. She could hear him because she was attuned to each shift of his mind, flick of the knee, the ear, the tail, his every need. She was his rider. He was her horse.

MARNI BERGER

19

“Stop it,” she whispered at the window, toward the horse. She could almost taste the ice, and the fantasy of it shook her teeth like rocks. “Don’t.” Her words flew forward before stopping hard. They expanded to fog and then shrank into water. “Don’t,” she said. “Stop.”

“Stop!” she hissed at the window frame, anxiety rising, her breath again clouding the glass, lips pressed close, kissing it, blurring it. “Please.”

But still: the lapping, the thumping. The snapping grass.

“Fuck!”

A sheet of wind through the rotting windowpane. And with it, the smell of burning wood and freezing snow. A mix of hot and cold that broke her trance. She shivered and tightened her bathrobe. Turned back to bed, rubbing her eyes, fingers cold, laughing without sound and shrugging.

Sleepwalking again.

I knew it from Grandpa, before I knew it as cliché: love makes you crazy.

He liked to be called Swamp Donkey, for fun and because we grandkids all had nicknames, too—mine was Rainbow Rose—and because he liked moose, especially after he retired to Maine. Swamp Donkey dropped into excess when my grandmother died and did something he wouldn’t normally have done.

He was raised the youngest son of a good old-fashioned Maine dairy farmer, a man who happened to be a wretched, horrid, abusive spirit, a poor soul, as my grandmother referred to him when she was still alive. A failed horse jockey, as the story goes; only Grandpa knew the details, but he was never much for words.

Grandpa.

Facts have it: he was born right into the Great Depression, 1929; a baby at the crash, he grew to be a shy romantic, despite how he was slapped back and forth by that horrid dairy man hand. Grammy told me this once in confidence, actually used the words dairy man hand, and I thought she was joking, but when I laughed, she didn’t; that’s how I learned what was funny and what wasn’t, at the age of five. It all depended on if it were something Grammy laughed back at.

He worked nights to pass the bar, selling insurance by day to become Attorney at Law. To make the world fair and right. Rigid in life and hard-locked in his 1950s role of father (eventually father of five), he did not believe in excess. He believed in right and wrong. He also believed in love, which unlike money, could not run out—he told me—but he preferred not gab about it.

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As soon as Grammy’s body, along with the cancer inside it, got burned into a box—and then, eventually, when the shock had passed and it was passed into a real urn—all of my grandfather’s abundant romance must have got uncorked by grief, loosened only to shoot out with great mania. He bought a ten-foot-tall, ten-foot-long oil painting. The practical man bought art.

Grandpa was crippled at the back, so he asked someone to hang the painting above his bed. He wanted it to hover above him like an angel; those were his words.

“Okay, Dad,” my mom said, sad and confused. After her mother’s death, she was probably by now quite used to shock, to her father waxing sad, saying like an angel.

“Fine, Daddy.”

The woman in the painting stood in the ocean, the tide high. One could guess a full moon was around. My fourteen-year-old eyes quickly noticed that the woman strongly resembled my grandmother; she wore her brown hair short. Like my grandmother, this painting-lady must have loved the water. Unlike my grandmother—as far as I know—while in said water, this woman was clad only in her birthday suit.

“That’s how I always imagined her,” Grandpa said, looking up at the painting from his recliner swivel chair, perched near his bedroom window that faced the ocean. The window framed the water like yet another painting. Or a film: waves always moving, waving: Hello, hello, I imagined them saying.

He was not one for words, or emotions for that matter, so when he said it, That’s how I always imagined her, and the tears began to form, he swiveled his chair away from us, away from the painting, and to the great blue, Maine sea. Gulls cawing and breaking green urchins open by dropping them on rock, again and again, until they’d completely smashed apart.

Preserved to some degree as all people are who die—in memory—there my grandmother remains, a naked lady in a painting, suddenly worth more than her wedding rings, hung above the bed where Grandpa used to sleep before he himself died, and framed in gold.

She lay down beside Jeremy, closing her eyes so they crumpled tight, urging herself to dream, to dream. Still. No sleepwalking, she told her mind.

She slipped her body into the nook of Jeremy’s curled up self, squirreling into his arms. His breath on her ear. “I feel safe,” she said aloud softly, to no one. “Safe, safe, safe,” because that seemed about right.

The wind shook the windowpane. She wondered about the horse. And, this MARNI BERGER

21

time awake, she stepped up out of bed and back to the window, peeking out, cupping her hands at each side of her face, blocking out all other light until her pupils dilated, vision adjusted.

Spruce scent whistled through the cracked pane. She inhaled deeply. Heart pumping, she couldn’t find him. Even though she could see it all now, the split rail fence, the barbed wire spiraling it, the barn, the pasture rippling into invisibility, as it did even in broad daylight, still, she couldn’t see him.

Then there he was suddenly, a tall horse, twenty hands high, orange and brown, a handsome guy, licking the snow.

She pressed her hand to her thumping chest, shook her head in disbelief; with something close to relief, she smiled and tiptoed to the door, opened it. It groaned, as she knew it would, as she stepped out, glancing back, and hoping Jeremy did not wake.

She breathed such a sigh when he didn’t.

Outside, it was true—as she’d feared in her sleepwalked dream—the horse had been cribbing. Chewing not ice but the not-barbed edge of the fence. Nervous.

What’s happening, Guy? she asked the horse. Now stepping closer, she was no longer worried. He stamped a foot into the ground, snorted as she edged nearer, her wool slippers breaking the hard snow.

The whole world was a glittered black bead. One of those winter nights full of spruce and star and sky and grass and nothing much else.

She breathed his mane. She clutched his hair and saddled up on.

When they moved together, fast, through the pasture, to the edge of the drive— from trot to canter, to gallop, full-speed, bareback—she finally felt it, tall and on top of the world.

The fresh relief of Cold.

It was never without risk. The first time Jeremy caught her out there with Guy, in the night, he grabbed her hair. Pulled her off the horse. Then he grabbed her wrist with his other arm and dragged her up and over the barbed wire fence, back to the house, where he tied her to the bed. She was bleeding from the barbs, but because of the cold, she could not feel much, and for that she was grateful.

He had said, in the dark of their room, hovering above her: “If you run, I will catch you.”

She had screamed, but he’d clamped her mouth shut, and she knew he was right.

When the wind whistled through the rotted pane, bringing with it a hint of spruce, burning wood, and something cold, she’d already agreed to make love to him. She

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liked to believe it was a question, a choice, something he’d asked and to which she’d said: Yes. Or even: Yes, my darling.

Sometimes she’d say, I love you, my darling, before he’d say anything at all. Before he’d say, If you run, I will catch you.

She liked to believe there were several roads to travel down.

But always, always, her body burned. And always, somehow, amidst the cold, something in her heart tore up like fire rising, until finally breaking down—so slowly—in the damp room where they slept.

Each time he caught her, the fire lasted just a little longer. She could almost taste the burn on her tongue. The hot and the cold mixing like a hurricane.

He liked to remind her with a slap on the rear after they’d finished: “I’m the fastest jockey you know.”

And he was. He won every race. He was the best horse jockey in the whole great big state of Maine.

By now, the damp having quenched the bright burn, she’d say, quietly: I know, my darling.

She imagined the ceiling was the sky, she imagined the sky full of stars, and she imagined Guy with her, always. And for imagining all such things, she imagined her heart could guide her, that she could follow.

Galloping.

What it would be like to race to the moon, my darling.

The year is 1995.

In the bathtub we play games with colored foam shapes that press onto walls, wet fish and trees, dogs and cats. We make stories, my sister and I. We get clean.

My mom on the edge of the tub fills a pitcher of water from the faucet, warm, and drains it: through hair, over eyelids, nose, and lips. Lavender-lemon, it tickles. We laugh.

Sometimes in the bathtub we sing, “I can’t stop this feeling!”

Or: “Winnie the Pooh doesn’t know what to do!”

Lately it’s “Mony Mony,” a new favorite. I sang it to my sister once, in the car.

“Mony Mony!” we sing.

The door opens, and my stepdad steps on through. He is tall. His jeans are ripped, his face is red, and his hair is white. He smells like cigarettes and cut green grass, and he looks like a backwards Santa Claus. His belly full of beer. His hands crossed with dirt. It’s a joke he likes to make: “Santa’s here!”

MARNI BERGER

23

My mother stands up, the green cast on her arm. “Yes?” she says.

“Yes what?” he says, laughing.

I press a cat onto the wall. My sister starts to cry.

“Why is she crying?” he says.

“Why are your shoes on in the house?”

“Why is she crying?”

I get a headache before every lightning storm in Ohio. My brain inflames. I tell my mom, “Squeeze my head,” palms to each side. “Please, Mommy.” And she does, and that’s the only thing that works. When the storm finally hits, the pain rises, drifts, and my mother’s hands relax. We go outside, usually. We like to watch from the porch.

It’s always the same. Like fireworks in a brown sky that was just now blue; it looks like the world is tearing itself apart, but it’s beautiful. Once, the dog Bounder was so scared, she tilted off the edge of the porch; distracted, she fell backwards into the garden. She had to hop back up beside us before the world electrocuted her. I told her it wouldn’t, but I could tell she didn’t believe me. Light charging through the sky, the horses as anxious as trees, rustling, all of us watching; I didn’t blame her, but the pressure was lifting finally. The storm is when the bubble pops, I told her. The storm is right before everything gets better. It’s the most valuable weather, I told her. She panted; she hid behind my bent knees among the plastic legs of the Outside Chair. Because it’s so strong. And sometimes, when you are really brave, you can run around in it, and the rain is warm and feels just so good. And you can be part of it, a bit. Mom doesn’t let me, so I mostly just imagine what that would be like. I think it would be wonderful. I imagine Bounder and me running through the charged clouds, all the time; sometimes she stands on her hind legs, panting, and I hold her two front paws, orange, and we dance in circles, in the rain, in The Neon Gray Everything.

I take a deep breath. I close my eyes and open them. I whisper to my sister through a whoosh of hot air: “Sh. Please.” My forehead is stinging. “God, I am begging you,” I say. “I have a headache.” She splashes water. She screams.

They step into the hall, and Mom is saying, “Please, please.”

He has a wild swirl in his eyes, yellow crazy eyes, like his favorite dog, his dog tied to the chain, the only one we’re not supposed to touch. “He’ll snap you right in half,” my stepdad always says.

He does not touch the cast, but maybe she is afraid he will, because I can make out from the tub how, in the soft light of the hallway, they aren’t fighting but she is bending, and falling on her knees, his hand hovering over her bright green cast, all

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the way to the ground.

I push a bird onto the wall. The foam sticks. My sister screams in short pierces; she is an ambulance siren.

“Get away!” Mom is sitting on the floor.

He stands, hands-on-hips. “I didn’t fucking touch you, Margaret.”

Which is true.

Sometimes it seems a storm’s rolling in, but it doesn’t come, not really. I just try to wait for the ache to end. It doesn’t end; it doesn’t end.

“I didn’t touch you!”

He goes into their room alone, and Mom gets up to dry us off.

“Because I’m still in love with you!” His voice has shrunk with distance, but you can feel it strain to reach us. He does that a lot, talks like he’s answering a question, when no one’s asked him anything.

My heart is full of sadness. I know his is breaking, has been since forever, and there is nothing I can do, but I do know what I want. I want to kick it in half. So something can happen, lightning and thunder, a cut from the heat, and something then after: a clean blue sky with air that’s crisp, with air that’s dry. Everything is better than the moment before the storm, the pressure building. It must be.

He says, “I feel like I’m dying! It would be better,” he says, “just to die!” Mom holds her hands over my ears, pushes hard, but it’s too late. Her palms relax.

Everything, I am sure, is impossible.

Mom’s eyes are wet. She pulls a shirt over my head. “Whatcha’ thinkin’, Rainbow Rose?”

“I might as well tell you now; you’re old enough to know,” my mother said. “Your stepfather is not a good man. He is trying to kill the horse. And that,” she sighed, kneeling down to my height, “is why we are leaving him.”

Leaving him? Where are we going? Sometimes I cannot remember whether I thought a response or said it. Whether my mother simply heard me, as most people do, via sound, or whether she heard me as I remember her hearing me, via telepathy.

In any case: “To Grammy and Grandpa’s, of course. Like we always do, but this time we are staying.”

I was ten years old. It was going to be wonderful. We were standing in the kitchen.

The stepfather was at work.

But: “What about the horse?” I asked.

MARNI BERGER

25

“What about the horse?”

“Yeah, what about him?”

“He’s coming.”

“No,” Grandpa said from the porch when we’d pulled up the driveway, parked, trailer full of one big horse, behind us. The trees were waving. The rain was pouring.

Grandpa was just standing there, soaking in it.

“Why not?” My mom got out of the car, let the door slam shut like a mouth, clamped. She was set.

“First off,” Grandpa limped with his cane, down the steps of the porch, “you didn’t even ask.”

“You were going to say no.”

“I’m saying no.”

“What do you want me to do? Go back?”

Grandpa looked at us in the car, back doors wide open: Four kids, one a baby. I watched his shoulders shift down, hunch, as he sighed. I watched the rain shrink him.

His knuckles white, his palm tight to the cane, as he leaned heavily on it.

Then suddenly his whole body jerked up. He looked at my mother, straight in the eye. “How old is that horse?”

I could tell she was hopeful because next she said, “He’s old anyway.”

“If he isn’t dead in a year, you will shoot him.”

She glared at my grandfather for a very long time. Finally, she nodded, and we went inside.

In 1929, Grandpa was born.

He rode the horse, Guy, by way of his mother’s belly, each night.

When her water broke, it was out in the pasture. His father, Jeremy, had to rescue them. Bring them to the hospital. Bring them back home.

Fume with anger.

For half a decade, from 1929 to 1934, there was a cycle: Jeremy rode the horse by day, a professional but weakening—and then soon failing—jockey, while Grandpa’s mother rode him by night, it all a secret, racing away, but not away. In circles really; she could never leave Grandpa.

Sometimes she was caught, other times not.

By the fifth year, however, she was growing clumsy. Noisy. Or maybe just sick of it.

Grandpa sometimes heard her wake, and he’d call to her in the night, hiss from

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his bedroom door: “Mother, stay. Mother, don’t go.”

“I’ll be back, honey,” she always said. “I always come back.”

Jeremy found her, often, dragged her, often over the barbed fence.

She had scrapes, wounds. The fire burning inside her, licking orange flames. The hot mixing with the cold. Always, it felt like winter. Always, it felt like summer inside her, sweltering. She tried to say, “I love you, darling,” when they kissed. But soon, it didn’t work anymore.

Once, she slapped him. Surprised herself with anger. But then: his thumbs on her neck.

And then, there it was, one night: the hurricane. Broke trees, homes, and people.

The hurricane of 1934.

She’d been riding Guy. Galloping, full speed, in the night as usual. The moon rising the ocean tide. Guy’s lips frothing, nostrils swelling.

She was thinking of leaving. Of running away. Just go go go, the horse seemed to invite, his knees bending like rubber, smoothly driving her away from where she simply could not be. For a while they rode straight and away. For a good ten minutes.

But then she turned the horse. Go back, she said. She didn’t have to say it aloud.

She stopped the horse near the barbed fence.

She slipped beneath it.

She thought-whispered to Guy: Don’t speak. As though he could. She tiptoed to the house. Tiptoed to Grandpa’s window, and she unraveled him from his blankets, and she carried him away—on and up, upon the big horse she placed him.

Jeremy was already out the front door when she’d gotten Grandpa onto Guy. The trees were already moving like arms. The sky was already half pale and half pitch.

Then suddenly black.

The stars were already gone, and the smile that was once stuck to her baby boy’s face was already transforming into something horrible, something monstrous, something irreversible, something never to be expressed by a child—by anyone—and she knew her boy would never be the same. He’d be bent.

At least he’d live. On the horse he was. She slapped Guy and: “Go!” The rain was already crashing.

The ocean was already high, and what water that fell from the sky was mixed with salt.

But the little boy fell from Guy’s tall back. He thumped to the ground with a sound like a single heartbeat. Because with a snap like a stick, as quick as that, the horse—with a cry—was shot down.

MARNI BERGER

27

Then the mother wrestled the rifle from Jeremy, who had run to the horse—his winning horse—in shock and disbelief. It was easy to take the rifle from him, in his horrified state; he hadn’t meant to shoot the horse down, only meant to stop him. It was easy to sneak up from behind, to grab the rifle from Jeremy, before cocking it, before blasting him in the face.

All night long, the trees seemed to hum, even from inside the home. The home seemed to swell when the wind breathed through it, and the mother rocked the child in her arms. She said to Grandpa, “I’m different now, Baby. I’m stronger, and tomorrow when the road is dry, we are going to run away.”

“How?” asked the boy, thinking of Guy, thinking of his own back, twisted, sore, stuck in place.

“I will carry you.”

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H O L LY H A W O R T H

How to Nourish How to nourish in a toxic world. How to nourish as a woman with wounds. How to nourish with a broken heart. How to nourish within the patriarchy. How to nourish consciously. How to nourish outside of the industrial food system. How to nourish in late-stage capitalism. Are these questions, or possible titles for an instruction manual? Words as nourishment—as the morsels you forage when all this is gnawing at you—are always partly both.

They are the questions and the answers that somehow feed you.

I could not eat. I could not eat because the world was sick and it got inside me and I was never separate. I did not eat custard. I did not eat pudding. I did not eat sludge it was only that the plumtree grew no fruit and I did not get fat. I did not eat a single pie and was not held in solitary confinement. I took not my food through a slot, a hand did not reach through and I was not alone and small when he watched me eat. Each bite by each, he watched. I ate cabbage. I ate beans. They were always bitter and salty and I could not eat and then I ate a lot. I satisfied myself, I swined. I slurried my shame in a pot. This isn’t about that. This is about how a hand did not reach out. I peered under the door, through the slot. I ate the night or it ate me. In the morning I awoke with a hunger you never dreamed, it was so big it gorged on the whole sky and I arose and milked the goats.

I arose. First sip of sap to make the wings beat, first flutters of hunger for what.

Love and fear taste the same on my tongue and I am not sure what to say now so we made hunger sounds, you held me. It was all I needed. If. If I wasn’t so hungry. There should be no shortages. And yet we hoard and hide and bolt the granaries and keep the sweetest, most fearful-sweet words in our mouths. My tongue is swollen. Grains unsprouted. So I say spit them out and be generous and wolves have long teeth and my bowl was empty and the world was wide and you couldn’t see. Couldn’t you see how hungry I was. My tongue lolled. I did not eat oats. I did not eat gruel. A hunger milked me through the night, held me in the dark but would not hold me up to the light, and I wanted the light of all the eyes to enter me. I was sucking my own tongue, teething my finger. That I might be full of. That my teeth might.

I once ate sand at Catawba Creek, ate slag. I once ate my own mind or my mind ate me. I once called this world not lonely, but that was before I arrived and then I called it everything. I once ate a fish’s eye. I once ate perfection, sliced it thin. Sharp

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knife. Skinned me. I once ate the flesh between two halves of a clamshell. I once loved a man who was brine. I once ate the pearl from an oyster. It lodged into my spine or naval halfway to my pelvis where it sits now in opalescent darkness. I won’t say stars. I once ate teasel, horse nettle, milkweed, twine. I once never ate before I came into the world and then I was always hungry.

I was hungry without you and so I ate pumpkins. And so I ate sweet potatoes.

Without you I ate barley, buckwheat, grouse. I scraped the mold off the ends of bread loaves, from between my toes. Hallucinated that I was satiated. I ate prickly pears, peyote, the nuts of piñon pine. Without you I ate mescal agave. I had a vision of sustenance and wished to cut off bits of my flesh for the crows. I ate coconuts, coffee grounds, cacoa. I sipped licorice. Slippery elm. There was no end to it. I tasted you in everything.

I was not in a prison. It was just that you never came.

You never came and the world got inside me. A question to chew on: How can you eat if you do not first empty your bowl. So spit out your tongue and say love.

Most will be lost and most ripped to shreds. Most blown away, most tossed, as the billion-seeded umbelheads toss their fruits to the wind and the earth always makes too much and the rest rots. I would that we would not go all together hungry here. If we could only say the syllables to pound each other tender. I only felt the need to feed you.

I spit up words like enzymes that would break down the world into digestible kindness.

I regurgitated generously and how I was starved for those vowels. I needed someone to feed, and half the milk spilled, half splashed out.

How starved I was. How raw. The world broke me down and so I ate the whole day and into the night. I ate truffles, yogurt, ice cream, paw paws. I ate pecans, a palm full of kumquats. Ate mushrooms, soft ruffled folds of hen-of-the-woods. I ate seaweed, banana leaf, liliko’i, seared ahi, acorns. While you slept I ate nomadically. In the morning there were birds at the feeder scattering seed with too-quick beaks and some always falls to the ground and is lost. How can we be fed if we do not spit this out and in the morning I arose with hunger. I ate the sky. I swallowed eternally and the world is not a prison is it. It is just a heart in the immaculate cage of the rib bones stunned by this hunger and the light of the morning.

H O L LY H AW O R T H

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