PATHOLOGICAL TRUTHER Lena Rubin
poems from an eighteen and then nineteen足year old human. i am trying to figure out how to take myself and others seriously, and/or if that is something i even want to do. thank you to the new york subway system, any and all unsolicited comments from men i've received in the last year or so, and prof. saskia hamilton. 2014足2015
BREAKTHROUGH SYMPTOMS On seventysecond and central park west at sundown a small woman comes out of suite 10C, eyes averted she doesn’t expect to see me nor I her. This waiting room was built for one and an untouched stack of magazines. Maybe there is a redness around her eyes I try not to look at her I am fine. Until in 10D I am told to “set goals for myself ” — My mother sends me a text later asking about the bill I don’t open it for two days. I get really stressed out before tests, a friend told me once, and I am paraphrasing. Maybe I have an anxiety disorder too. Here, take a half, he says, it’ll fuck you up and he hands over the yellow pill with subtlety and a little smile like my parents slipping a crisp twenty under the table when I haven’t seen them in a while. I think of the thousands of yellow milligrams housed in orange plastic they unfroze me made me hungry tired made me wake with faint cobalt bruises on the insides of my legs. I watch him across the table he shrugs and swallows. Four months in it is junior year one day in April. I am late for school and let the front door fall closed behind me — forgetting — By third block I feel a sunkenness worse than any hangover. In Calculus cold drops of sweat on the nape of my neck the transparency of my skin and a faint buzzing. I forget many things now I cannot forget the seventyfive collected milligrams 25 yellow 50 blue pastelhued innocuous like the walls of a child’s bedroom or a nice pantsuit. I have a friend who has been on Zoloft since age twelve. When he told me in my room, recognizing the orange plastic on the shelf, the white labels with their barcodes, I could not shake myself of his smile his ease — maybe I am fine maybe I am the same.
DREAM from which I woke up crying very late in the afternoon I and another either of us woman or man or perhaps not I cannot recall but I and a lover nonetheless a lover to die soon of some heart足wrenching illness in the grass we sat on a blanket and greeted our friends I served lemon tea which I remember tasting very bitter.
UNSOLICITATIONS I. Ordering coffee at the halal stand on 114th the man says let me guess milk and no sugar because "you are so sweet already" II. I think it is because I am smoking a cigarette that a guy who I have half met once who has a thin mustache is telling me the idea for his screenplay the whole idea see is that it's only three words said over and over again by many different characters one of the words is probably "death" I look into his eyes take a drag and very purposefully nod III. One night at a frat party you tell me I remind you of your mother we are partners in beer pong I laugh and mutter something about Freud under my breath but you look at me sincerely soberly I don't want to be your mother. IV. The greyhaired man at the desk he looks at you and says "she's back" he smiles his sly greyhaired smile. V. Later under blankets you tell me you did not expect to meet people like me here you're just so threedimensional I look down at my naked body existing in space of course I am threedimensional what kind of fucking line is that VI. In the bathroom mirror the eyes of a girl I don't know examine the
purpled marks on my neck while I brush my teeth I keep waking up to your unbrushed teeth and mine, keep meaning to leave but not quite wanting to you keep apologizing for wasting my time as if none of this were my choice.
FOR TWO BOYS WHOSE NUMBERS I HAVE SINCE DELETED FROM MY PHONE As you led us up the stairs I was reminded of the fact that you wore axe, and I remembered that I liked the smell of axe, and I was ashamed, thinking of masculinity packaged as deodorant or face wash or hair gel, and those billboards: all defined pecs and disembodied females’ hands. “Your woman is drunk,” you told him. “Your girl isn’t doing too well.” at one point, I think, it was even “your female.” Terms of property. Your doubleX chromosome. Terms of posession. I was too drunk to say anything when we sprawled on the couch and I wore only a buttonup flannel, unbuttoned, and you took a picture of me with your cell phone. Two times “no” wasn't enough, I guess. Rules of posession are flexible, I guess. Traded hands. In the morning, your arms were curled around mine, not hers, and I was in bed with you and not him. And you looked at me with a strange sort of softness. The weak warm sun in my eyes. I hope the picture turned out well. It’s really too bad you've got a Samsung. Heard the picture quality on those is subpar. Hope the both of you looked at it again once I got off the train. Hope you put it in a group text. Hope the next day at school you got a bunch of high fives.
SUNDAY each morning I wake up to you now that they are more and more I try to capitalize on something the way your mouth and nose turn down in sleep halfopen Aeschylus on the dresser your piles of tshirts under sun crystals this morning you tell me to look at the smoke from the stacks on the roof and it is tossed mercilessly by the February wind probably good enough for Basho the pathos of it but my eyes drop away and onto the round warm shoulders of you you have two pimples on your shoulders I don’t mean to stare but I do I have thought about writing a poem about your skin before the word alabaster always comes to my mind though I wish it wouldn’t and I have seen from a kind of distance the bones of your nose and neck and chest glittering some snowy morning but I’ve heard enough bad poetry to know that skin and stone and bones have been done and done again — thank god you you, in the morning, 25 minutes after 11, are spotted with red ripe and inflamed. I will touch laugh (a little bit) and not need to draw
THERE ARE MANY KINDS OF POWER after Audre Lorde
Home over spring break at the kitchen table when my father interrupts and says something to the tune of “You say such smart things don’t you want people to listen to you” — rehearsing my speech respeaking my words in the way he wants to hear them, translating as he always does telling me, “Enunciate,” I want to say I have a lot to say, want to be able to say it as it comes, brain to throat to tongue and teeth I am tired of generational and gendered dismissal of my teenage girl speech it is a function of myself, of ourselves— in crowded subway cars down loud sidewalks I speak too quickly with female friends speaking over each other we write our own language build a sort of electric charge, overlapping, sparking, narrating a frequency both individualized and collective. An assertion of the lifeforce of women.
But still, at a table in the dining hall, dining with boys who think they know everything but so do I my frequency unmatched when talk turns to gender to sex to hierarchies or hegemonies of some sort as talk often does everything reproduced through the arena of speech itself — my voice feels always too measured incapable of that certain gruffness or that urgent sort of loudness or simply the sureness —
I am always being convinced, someone is always playing devil’s advocate someone is always talking over me but Strength is illusory if it is fashioned within the context of male models of power. I want to fight the feeling that I must be more loud more gruff more urgent more sure in order to be heard.
In public school a girl I know was sent home her shirt was too lowÂcut. Classrooms these apparently fragile sites these apparently fragile teenage boys endangered by the possibility of breasts halfÂcovered by cotton on a June day. The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. In these same classrooms I sat with ideas restless constrained by the smallness of my body I sat frustrated by the span from my shoulders to my fingertips as I stretched as far as I could. We are taught from kindergarten to use our bodies as indicators of intellectual curiosity. In English class in my assigned seat near the back perpetually dwarfed behind thickets of yearning arms the boys propel themselves up with their calves reach their strong forearms to the ceiling. White male eyes meet the first nods at the second who lowers his hand, bodily release, and begins to speak.
EXAMPLES OF HOW TO BE AFRAID In unconscious there are no instructions but I have found during moonlight hours these hot fleeting attachments: wild horses rearing back attempted restraint, futility I used to dream of empty homes, breaking and entering. The terrifying ease of it and then the hard cold morning sweat. In a January dream I am a bowling ball alone in a subway car tracks like polished wood, I am rolling, propelled by a flick of the wrist the Hudson doubled, flanking. I am traveling someplace cool to the touch, either gutter足dark or blinding white. In waking my shoulders press my eardrums and plastic hugs the roof of my mouth. In a February dream my red car is lost and burning without me on hot concrete. It wasn't me but it was my will. In waking I don't own a red car but it must mean something.
FULL STOP February refuses to thaw; I run up and down glass stairs looking for orange neon letters which won't be lit until morning. Composing phantom texts to a boy who drove barefoot in a Mini Cooper from the parking lot. A boy and a Mini Cooper I don't want to want to see again in my mind I am more than somewhat sourly turning over the politics of a goodnight kiss. I thumb the home button on my uncharged phone ceaselessly inside the pocket of my jacket; I call out to a pair of black headphones and a pair of jeans. Offer him eye足apology for the alcohol on my breath and the way my words are churning underneath my tongue and as I return the stranger's cell phone I take pains that our hands do not touch In December I wake 足足 doubled spine a blue plastic seat. I have reached a destination that is not quite mine and it is not quite twelve months later but
once it gets cold the memories of cold begin to melt together. On this not足quite anniversary I am colder and drunker and farther from the address I recite to the cab driver amidst end足of足shift radio static and I wait now as I did then for the familiar curves of home.
APRIL, RIPENING Bare legs shifting under me I smell the sweat on my bare feet I wonder who designed the chair and detest the concept of it. The short night 足足 abandoned book, study cubicle, the title "Fictions of Romantic Irony" I open it seek poetry and find footnotes. * The world endlessly coming into being I see it so plainly sometimes. Sunday, Central Park West, upper Nineties two boys on a bench, one reads aloud to the other a poem. And the sun warms the suede of his jacket
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY His vest is powder blue, hers orange: their lower halves match in denim bootcut. Standing behind me on the platform seventeen after midnight we are all waiting for the 1. The train is coming in nine, says the screen and I observe them from a strange quarter turn. He peers over his glasses at a folded newspaper, begins to read above the murmur about Tampa real estate, endless mindless numbers, now Charlotte, and New York, this is his guilty pleasure maybe. She nods the way you nod sometimes at a man. Now she quarter足turns, his head remains bowed, she paces a small circle away from his talk of mortgage rates then faces him. Eyes him up and down he doesn't notice. "The train is coming," she says.
OH, I ONLY ROLL MY OWN The redhaired woman, and I believed she was naturally a redhead given that everything else about her seemed so honest, pinned her hair up using, for reference, the halfreflective window into the darkness of the subway tunnel. With less of a noticeable distance between her and the tattooed man, now, they spoke in low calm tones about the announcement from the conductor. I didn't want to get involved but the tattooed man was right. Due to delays, he next stop would be 157th. She didn't believe him. He held in one hand a brown package of Amsterdam Shag tobacco. And the other twirled his handrolled cigarette quickly, top to bottom, between his thumb and forefinger. Her feet, in white Converse high tops, the tops of which appeared to cut off circulation, if only slightly, to her ankles, jiggled up and down against the black speckled floor. She was a saddrunk that was it and he was used to this. Otherwise, there was something deeply sinister going on here. I'd seen them on the platform before. Stared at them.
She was sobbing, grabbing at him impatiently, burying her head in him. Squeezing so hard that he looked like a ragdoll, his arms floating out to his sides with each subsequent squeeze, his feet seeming to lift off the ground.
JULY(S) sometimes it feels like entering through a very narrow door sometimes tired muscles feel more like sadness than anything else broadway last night walking toward 115th with a friend a honk a stranger he was taken aback my friend not the stranger and I told him welcome to the male gaze, bitch. fighting the urge to contain. and sometimes I feel quite good and full robust, even, is a good word but still I do not know what it means when a stranger tells me I have a “quick mind.” on the subway I move my backpack so a man with stained hands can sit spread his legs prop his elbows up white paint on his hands, shirt, pants no stains on my clothes he makes me feel contained. there is wifi in the subway but I want to be underground unreachable understanding what it means to be down here next to this man he rests his beard in his hands white paint flecks nestling in red curls. and across from him two women in dyed red hair take turns cradling a bottle of strawberry Moscato and photographing each other “I don’t think I look good in the picture. I photograph terribly I think
I’m ugly.” her friend takes her phone back. “you’re beautiful. look at your eyes.” they are tealblue and of course, she can’t
see them.
BURLINGTON a may morning which felt precarious from its start I woke thinking, inexplicably, of jacques lacan my lips close to spilling his name what was your mirror stage like? and if you HAD to pick one realm which would it be, the Real or the Imaginary? last night I dreamt I was caught between two the gaze, or rather THE GAZE in italics or capitals, certainly, or in the intonations of someone sage but, no, it ran simply and quietly along the crevices of my sleep I dreamed a party with old friends yours, not mine and couch cushions into which I sunk I entwined legs along your shoulder blades and the crevices beneath your arms I did not know if we would do this alone by the time you came out of the shower wet hair that led zeppelin t足shirt 足足 I had forgotten all I could say was good morning
THE DECISIVE MOMENT There is a sort of mock living足room in the Rare Books Room in the Strand. On the third floor, a carpet and armchairs so that one might get comfortable and imagine a glass of scotch in one's right hand while one persuses a jacketed first edition of Leaves of Grass or something. I sit to look through a book of Henri Cartier足Bresson who in his photographs captures Paris in a peculiar way. Without that sort of weary decadence and myth. There is a man sitting in the armchair next to me. He holds no book in his lap but scrolls through his email. He looks over his shoulder, asks me, "Have you seen his work before?" His tone tells me that even if I am somewhat knowledgeable about Cartier足Bresson I should listen very closely to whatever he is about to say. And I say yes, but not in the flat way I intended. It sounds quiet, unsure. "Well it's a great collection," he says, voice rising a few notes. "The reproductions are very well足done." I look down at the book unwieldy on my small lap and, yes, I agree, but then again, I didn't ask, and he is sitting in an armchair in the Rare Books Room in the Strand bookless and I nod at my lap and he nods at me and goes back to some very important emails.