The Most Poetic
A journal of poetry and prose
Poems & Prose
"Linger" By Cat Lei I guess there are many crises that I can choose to write about—traumatic events that have nearly ruined my family—but I struggle to come to terms with them. It makes me depressed to reflect on the darkness I think I carry so I try not to. Instead, it’s condensed into an old diary bounded by a loose rubber band and squared away. I could talk about my failed friendships and the girls I think about often. I keep our memories alive like a broken clock. I could talk about the boy I think I might’ve loved. I could talk about the way I used to follow him around the world and I wouldn’t even mind admitting that somewhere in the 14th arrondissement last spring, he broke my heart as I ashed our final cigarette. Heartbreak reminds me of when I was a teenager and my mom’s departure was still a fresh wound. It has been a particularly rainy season in the Netherlands this year. The evening news tells me that it has been ten days since the sun has come out. Today is a Wednesday which meant the only thing I had on the agenda was to meet my friends at the bar before happy hour ended. The bar was across town but since I only had one in-person class this term, it was often the only time during the week I could see them. I remind myself to respond to messages that have been accumulating in my inbox on the metro ride over. The difference in time zones works in my favor but I still feel guilty for not calling home often. I feel guilty for leaving them and for always wanting to leave. I text my little sister—she’s on spring break right now and had just woken up. I tell her we can call after I get home from the bar and a minute later, she sends a photo of her in bed with our cat. She’s smiling hard and her face is pressed against Kota’s. I study the photo for a few moments and think about her. I reach for my worn green Moleskine journal from my desk and swing my body over the twin bed to retrieve a fallen pen off the floor. In bright pink ink, I jot the date in the right hand corner 4/3/24. I went to bed at 7:30 again this morning. I actually wanted to sleep today. Or yesterday I guess. I got back late last night and smoked again. But I hadn’t in two days. And I haven’t had a cigarette in three. Kai texted me last night but it feels weird now. I don’t think we’re going to talk about what happened in Paris but I guess we don’t need to. We went to a jazz bar but he was on his phone and didn't talk to me the entire time we were there. As we approached the second hour, a girl with striking green hair walked over with a huge spritz and said rather loudly, “This is for you, love. Don’t mind your boyfriend, he’s a fucking loser.” My cheeks burned at the word “boyfriend.” She gave me a small smile and walked back to her table without so much as glancing over at Kai who was clearly embarrassed. We left a few minutes after that at my request. I held my breath the entire way back. I cap my pen and entertain the idea of having a cigarette. I go back and forth in my head for a while as usual. I end up grabbing the pack of Chinese cigarettes my mom left for me when she visited not two weeks prior and walk outside. It’s a little past eight in the evening but there’s still plenty of light to illuminate the lone chair I haphazardly placed on the balcony, days after I arrived in Rotterdam. It is still lightly drizzling. After a while of standing by myself, I see my mom on the balcony next to me, marveling at the lush flora before us. “I was just like you when I was younger. 大胆 and 粗鲁. Always running around like the world was mine to take. You get it from me," she says. The characters 大 means big and 胆 is courage. Combined, it means courageous or daring. My family has always used it to describe me as a child—my dad says it in disapproval whereas my mom gushes it as if it was my best quality. She seldom tells me of her youth but I know that the life she had dreamt for herself in her 20s were replaced overnight by an unexpected pregnancy and the looming realities of motherhood. 3/22/24. I dropped my mom off at the airport today. We hung out for a bit after we dropped her bag off. There was an hour before she wanted to go in so we had a cigarette outside and talked. She told me that she would miss me and I said it back. She said that this trip was good for our relationship and I wanted to cry. We didn’t talk much after that and instead let what she said hang in the air between us. I got on the metro back to our hotel and cried. Cried over the eight years I didn’t have a mother. Cried over the eight years she didn’t have a daughter. Cried over the twenty years she spent building a family with now nothing to show for it. I unlocked the door to the hotel we’d been staying at for the last week and once again, grieved over her absence. “Why does the sun set so late here?” my mom asks. “We’re on a higher latitude than California is,” I responded after a moment. “Does it bother you at night? When you’re trying to sleep?” “I don’t know. Maybe.” “Do you like it here?” She presses. “The city itself is okay. I’m happy out here though. In Europe, I mean.” She looked over at me and studied my face. I wonder if she saw herself in my reflection the same way I did in hers. Her youth preserved on my face. She caressed my face with her left hand; a lit cigarette nestled between the pointer and middle of her other. The scent on her fingertips is reminiscent of my childhood—how she’d smoke in secrecy but the smell would almost always give it away, clinging onto her clothes the same way it now lingers on mine. The tar in my throat feels almost a part of my destiny.
"At Kerouac’s Memorial" By Don Bates Jack, I’ve come back to walk this monument to your life, reminded once more of the moment you shaped, molding mill-town memories into literary myth, drag racing America’s buttoned-down drift, leaving skid marks on the road wherever you drove. Alone now, I muse on what you mercifully meant, recalling the legions who mimed your steps, toe tapping jazz joints, strong arming bars, hitch hiking the country in fantasy and fact. Pied piper, alter ego, alternative dad, you fanned the fury of incipient revolt. Like you, we felt the chill in the nation’s spirit after the war that taught us A-bombs and ovens. Like you, we sought refuge from split-level demands— house in the suburbs as our cities turned rust, belief in ideas like fairness and freedom while millions among us lived color-coded neglect. Those were the days we battled questions for hours. Where to go? What to do? How to fashion our worth? Whom to see? Whom to know? How to deliver our dreams? Words became the ultimate aphrodisiac, seducing us with answers we’d never undressed. And who can forget the hedonistic pursuits: drinking too much booze, smoking too much dope, meditating with mantras, native Inuit chants, car radios beating bongos and rhythm ‘n blues, devouring “beat” authors we figured as friends— Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Holmes, and you with your souped-up poetry and prose? You urged enlightenment no matter the price, to see life for what it isn't, to hold nothing back, trusting in Zen wisdom and “radiances” instead, like the time I saw fire explode from the wall as I lay in the bathtub immersed in Strauss, “Death and Transfiguration” scrubbing my head. I touched the flame and was not burned. You told us to commune with nature as conspicuous as monks, to go naked like angels into the subterranean world, discovering new beginnings where most people end, to breathe as the trees without moving our lungs. Jack, I'm amazed how I remember so much, standing amidst this silence of Simonized stone, here at the heart of landmark Lowell, cradle of your Franco-American birth and youth, the place you retired to for years before death, a strangely ornery, solitary cat. Eight marble columns stand etched with your words— poems and parts of poems, fragments of fiction, a few lines explaining who you thought you were: “crazy Catholic mystic,” “madman,” “bum.” I pass the inscriptions like Stations of the Cross, mindful again of the legacy we share: same town, same church, same working class, untimely death of the brother we adored, need to write before we'd grown hair on our chests, cities we moved to like LA and New York, multiple marriages, the redundant search. What the columns don’t say, I can’t forget: how you died so sadly after sharing so much joy, your final year in Florida, still drinking to excess, seated in your kitchen, blinds drawn tight, sun light, once worshipped, now too much to bear. Like everyone's world, there's plenty to blame: your father's misfortunes while still in your teens, days at Columbia where you quit football for art, headline homicide you tried to hide for a friend, mid-life erosion of your Hollywood looks, liquor, hallucinogens, hardcore drugs, “the disease” that for Rimbaud you called "overlife." You certainly travelled well beyond your means. Or was it too many years blowing bridges to hell or too much fame absent the Swiss bank account? Perhaps it was primordial like your mother’s love. She seemed like the anchor in your ocean of hurt. Or maybe the fear you'd never gain what you’d dreamt, the “hermitage in the woods,” “quiet writing of old age.” Or was it, after all, just a matter of health? You lived with the time bomb of phlebitis in your legs. Whatever the reason, it's a god-damn shame, though no one who knew you would say your life was in vain. You left us your books to help measure our days. Jack, I have to go now, I have other visits to make. I promised my daughters we'd go shopping at the mall. They’re waiting with my parents in the old-folks home just down the street from where you shouted as a kid. As always, they’ll ask me why I took so long. Today I think I'll tell them in the simplest terms, I went to see a guy I once loved to read. He died at 47, a broken mess, but not before he took some of us on a wild-haired trip, breaking the speed limits of permissiveness, teaching us what it means to touch the substance in our souls, to live before we die instead of dying while we live.
"Early Days" By Kendall Wood The fluorescent lights only add to the clinical ambiance. I just know that the camera in my face doesn’t need the flash to be on in order to see every pore, every baby hair, every little blemish upon my face. I’m so sleep deprived and drained of energy that I don’t think I can pull off the ecstatic smile I practiced in the mirror when she gets here. I’m just going to lose my shit. I shake in anticipation, and maybe also from the spinal anesthetic. When she’s here. After all this waiting, it’s only going to be a few more minutes. The doctor and nurses are talking about their weekend plans. The anesthesiologist keeps asking me questions but I can barely focus on what she wants to know. Stupid things like what the baby’s name is going to be, if we have an outfit picked out, if we have other kids. No, no, no. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to know that my baby is okay. I don’t even correct her when she calls Trey “Dad.” Trey is holding my hand and watching the faces of the doctors. He occasionally rubs my hand with his giant, soft thumb and his leg is twitching like it always does when he’s anxious. I know he badly wants to check behind the curtain, he has the weirdest, darkest, morbid curiosity. He wants so badly to be the tough one in this scenario, to be able to one- up me and say, “yeah you might have had seven layers cut through but I watched it!” Finally, finally, they tell me that they have a hold of her, and she’s coming out. Easy peasy. A couple of seconds later, they raise my shell-shocked baby, fresh from the womb, above the privacy curtain for me to see. She’s completely limp and her eyes are closed, so I think something is wrong. “It’s a girl!” the doctor exclaims, and if I had more working brain cells, I’d wonder how she was so peppy at 2 o’clock in the morning. “She’s okay?” I asked, the strength in my voice surprising me. Trey squeezes my hand. His leg has completely stopped shaking, and he’s looking at a table I can’t see. “She’s perfect! We’re just going to clean her and wrap her up and bring her to Mom!” I hear the nurse say. Her voice is cotton candy and it’s so displaced that I can’t help but be suspicious that it’s only to calm me. It’s still so silent. Aren’t babies supposed to cry? “What are they doing?” I ask Trey. He’s so focused. “They’re squeezing some gunk out of her nose and throat, she’s okay.” he says. Then I hear the almost silent, but oh-so- angry, little cries. Like someone is holding a speaker on low volume on the other side of the room. Something inside of me breaks in relief. Holy fucking shit. That’s my baby. It's surreal. Tears spill over and fall into my hair. Someone brings her to me, cleaned up and wrapped in a little warm blanket with blue and pink footprints on it. She stops crying when she’s placed on my chest. Her eyes are goopy and shut so tight that even though I can tell she’s trying, she simply can’t find the energy to open them to look at me. The people behind the curtain are doing something that makes my whole body shake me back and forth across the operating table, but I barely notice. All I can do is stare at her little face, drink her in, and rub her gently with my hand. She’s absolutely perfect. Did mom hold me like this when I was born? Did she look at me with this love and awe? Or was she impatient to get back home and hand me off to Gramma? I’m sobbing, sitting on the rocks in the backyard. Mom is standing over me, arms on her hips, lips pursed in irritation. I’m using the palms of my hands to press down on my knee, which is freely bleeding and stings from the tiny rocks that got implanted in the open wound. “Can you please help me up?” I ask. “Rosemary,” she chides. “This is exactly why I told you not to run.” She crosses her arms, shifts her weight to the other leg, and shakes her head at me. I cry harder at the rejection. “I wasn’t running,” I screech, my voice as gravelly as the ground below me. I can barely catch my breath. It hurts so bad. “I tripped!” She rolls her eyes when Trey finally gets to me, he must have heard my cries from the living room, where he was playing on the PlayStation. He scoops me up and carries me to the kitchen. Mom’s voice trails after him as she follows. “You’re just giving her the attention she wants,” she says. “She’s fine.” The memory stings, but not in my knee. I blink and hold my daughter closer. “What’s her name, again?” the nurse who handed her to me is still close by, her hand resting on the baby’s small form, as if ready to grab her in case I drop her. “Emmaline,” I whisper to my baby. Her tiny mouth opens in a yawn. I smile. “My sweet Emmaline.” In the postpartum room, after the breastfeeding debacle, where my breasts are poked at and prodded by more people in five minutes than have touched them up to now, Trey shows me the photos of me holding her for the first time. I zero in on the dark circles under my eyes, unplucked eyebrows, and the giant pimple on my chin. But despite all that, I am the heart-eyes emoji. It’s a theme that continues in the early days of being a mother. I look horrible, I haven’t slept, there’s chaos reigning all around me, but I’m looking at my baby like there’s never been anything more lovely in existence. And I’m right. I’m surprised by the amount of help the nurses give me, since I’m on my own with no partner. Trey went home, and apparently I’m not supposed to get out of bed for almost 24 hours after the surgery, so I’m supposed to call them to come in and help me change Emmaline and feed her every two hours. But she just wants to sleep. It’s much more like a vacation than I was expecting. Except for, you know, the major surgery part. But as my skin and organs work their way back to seamlessness, I’m allowed to order as much “room service” as I like from this iPad with a million options. Since I’ve been too sick to enjoy food for the last nine months, the plain turkey sandwiches and Caesar salads and chicken and mashed potato dinners are heavenly. I mostly eat turkey sandwiches with all the fix ins, and I savor every bite. I avoid my texts for almost the entire time I’m in the hospital, though. After the initial photos and update that Emmaline was born and that we were both healthy that I sent to immediate family (and that they, in turn, sent to everybody they knew), I didn’t open anyone’s texts. Trey and his cat, Ham, facetimed me every day to check on us both and dote over the baby, so I didn’t need to text him even. On the last day, early in the morning while Emmaline nurses and Trey is nervously packing up the room, I finally check my texts. Mom sent twenty-two messages after she got the photos three days ago, and I notice that there was actually a bit of a wall of text that I hadn’t noticed when I was in labor, and ignored when I sent her the info about Emmaline’s birth. “Uhhh,” I say. “Mom lost her shit.” Trey was silent for a moment as he pretended to be very focused on adjusting the straps on the brand-new baby car seat. “Don’t read her texts,” he said. But I already had, the first texts she sent after I told her I was heading to the hospital glaring at me. Mom: Well, good luck I guess. Mom: I still don’t understand why I can’t come and watch my own grandchild be born, but whatever. Mom: Just keep me updated please. Mom: Hello? Rosemary? Why aren’t you responding? Mom: Well I just really wish you would call me and update me. How far along are you? How many centimeters dilated? How much longer do they think? Are you getting the epidural? Mom: Thanks for having Tristram call me and talk me down, but I still think you’re being a little sensitive. No one cares about your vagina. I’m not asking because I want to know about your vagina. I’m not a pervert. Mom: It’s perfectly normal to ask a new mother about her labor progress! Mom: I just think it’s a little messed up that you’re posting on Instagram but you’re not even able to text me updates about your labor. I’m always the last one to know about everything. Mom: It’s been 6 hours since I heard from Tristram. I’m getting very worried. If I don’t hear back soon, I’m going to call the hospital. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say. Trey sighs. “She lost her shit,” he says calmly. “But you were experiencing trauma and I figured it was the last thing you needed.” “But she knew I was getting a c-section, you told her when I signed the paperwork and everything. She got updates! Why was she freaking out?!” “Yeah, I thought she’d calm down when I texted her that you were going into the Operating Room, but she just freaked out even more. I told her you wouldn’t have your phone for a while and to stop expecting you to text her back right away, you were a little busy.” I skim the screen as I continue to scroll, my jaw dropping in incredulity at what I see. Trey takes my phone from me, very gently, and looks me in my eyes. “You’re just going to stress yourself out. It’s all handled, I talked to her today. She promised to leave you alone for now. I know you’ll have to deal with it later, but for now, just try not to spend the energy on it. You,” he palms my disheveled hospital hair. “Have to get better and take care of the little one.” He raises his eyebrows, expectant. I nod, and he swipes out of her message and hands me my phone back. Most of the other texts are normal, people just saying congratulations and that they can’t wait to meet the baby. After a long checking-out process, which requires Trey to take three trips to the car in the fastest walk I’ve ever seen because he’s terrified is going to get towed before we’re able to all walk down together, I’m finally able to go home. I yell at Trey to drive less like a psychopath whenever he turns or goes over a bump, because all the jiggling makes my incision feel weird, like it’s about to rip apart. I check my bandages when I get home and tell him that I’m not getting in the car again until the damn thing is healed. Trey stays in my tiny apartment for two months and helps with overnight feeds so I can get a full night’s rest and my incision can heal. He is a literal godsend, and I appreciate him so much, but it’s still harder than I expected even with his help. He lives less than 10 minutes away, so he goes back home to work and take care of his cat, but sleeps on my couch. I only get about 6 hours of sleep per night and it’s just never enough. He still has work after the two weeks he takes off, so it’s not like he can just sleep during the day. And Jesus, babies are hard. In the early days of motherhood I learn many things, but two stand out to me as monumental learning moments that I want to share with everyone I meet so they can be prepared when they have their own children. The first is that everything you believe about motherhood is wrong. Labor and delivery are nothing like how it’s depicted in fiction. You don’t just wake up and know you’re in labor and go to the hospital and have a baby two hours later. And people aren’t nearly as helpful and lovely towards new mothers as you would expect. Aside from my brother, who is a rarity in his selflessness and love towards his little sister, not a single person offered to help me at all. They all showed up to the baby shower a few months before Emmaline got here, but not a single person dropped off food, offered to come over to help clean, or even texted me to ask how I’m doing. The second is that becoming a mother will call into question everything your own mother did when you were a child. It was like the moment Emmaline was evicted from my womb, and I laid eyes on her, the entire world came to a halt. That part is true, at least. Everything stopped and nothing else mattered but her. And I knew in that moment, and in every moment after, that while parenting was hard and it challenged you beyond what you thought was even possible, you could never hurt that little baby of yours. You could never allow them to be hurt. And while that feeling is significant and incredible, there's a bitter taste that accompanies it. I get frustrated with her, my sweet baby, in my weakest moments. Those moments where I’m sleep-deprived, in pain, hungry, thirsty, and overstimulated – but she needed a bottle, or a cuddle, or something else, and won’t go to sleep or stop crying. Yes, of course I get frustrated. But behind all of that, I know that it’s not her fault. So I take a beat, and sometimes it’s much longer than a beat, but I always come back smiling and playing so that she always knows that she’s loved. No matter what, she’s loved. And while I know that there are going to be times that I am pushed to my absolute limits, probably more so than now, in these early months – I also know that I will never hurt her intentionally. I will never abuse her. I will never put my own selfish desires over her needs. That bitter taste is new. It’s black licorice in my throat, and it takes effort to not choke. I used to make excuses for my own mother. “It’s her first time living too,” and all that. But with motherhood came this realization that it shouldn’t have been so easy for her to do the things she did to me. Of course, she had her own generational curses to break, and she did break some, but why didn’t she try harder to work on her issues so that she wouldn’t hurt me and Trey? “I did my best, so I stand by what I did.” It’s one of those moments, rarer now but not nonexistent, where I feel utter peace and contentment. I don’t have to return to work for two more weeks, I’m well-rested because Emmaline is starting to sleep longer through the night, and she and I both are fed and relaxed. She’s sleeping soundly in my arms while I rock her gently, baby Mozart playing on the soundbar in the living room. I stare into her face as she sighs in her sleep, and I wonder what little things I’ll do between now and when she’s my age that will screw her up. I can't control everything, but I decide I will always apologize if I hurt her. Even if I meant well. Even if I didn’t mean to. They always say babies should come with instructions. I can’t help but agree, now more so than before, even when I thought I knew all there was to know about motherhood. But I think those instructions need to be about forgiving your own mother. Because now, I don’t know if I can.
"Ode To A Spider" By Julissa Thomas A deep umber speck on my high, white ceiling. Resembling a smudge. Its slim, toothpick-like legs, reaching with delicate might. It spindles down its whimsy web, like a midnight dancer slipping down a silvery pole. I fear it’ll disappear the moment I look away. It inches closer. My body tenses. It pauses. Observes my panic. I imagine her eight eyes peer directly into the two of mine. I inch my face toward her, curious to understand more. She swiftly begins scaling the web she descended. Had she been as scared of me as I had been of her? All eight of her dainty legs plant themselves onto the plush of my bed. How could it present itself so humanly? Her thoughts were transcribed through small movements: A sudden jolt showing fear; a small step showing interest. A seed of fascination took root in the tissues beneath my skull, embedding themselves into the grooves and hollows. A connection without communication. A friendship between a girl and a spider.
"The Proteus" By Luis Torres The lit end of a cigarette crumbled and fell away from Serrot Siul’s hand, and pretty soon the cherry burned at his fingers. A hot labyrinth of stars in the February sky read to Serrot his destiny… into one of those decorated urns, it was likely, that the Puerto Rican market on Autumn Ave had shelved near the rosaries and cigars—into one of those, packed. Serrot flicked the cigarette, watched as it drew a shining curve like a tiny comet. His watch read a quarter until midnight: It was time to consult the medicine cabinet, and with unvarying steps he circled back under the streetlamps that hissed in the dark to a cold-water flat on the East Side of the city. The pills were delivered earlier that morning. Taken daily they increased the vitality of Serrot’s lung function. Three pills on a corner toward midnight. Then one day and one night would be added to the universe. This—and a great need to sleep would come over Serrot, who would sink in the ruby plush of a sofa in the study and put aside the stars and the garden outside the walls. It was a cold and wet Saturday that followed. Serrot stayed in for dinner and re-read, in order to understand these things, the last words that Plato attributed to his teacher, Socrates. He learned that the soul may escape when the flesh dies. “May?” The uncertainty left Serrot in the slight onset of fever—Serrot who wanted to continue being Serrot. The man felt a new kind of disdain for the Greeks since they talked about the universe as if it were a riddle—a riddle they said was beautiful precisely because it couldn’t be solved. With that deceit born from the knowledge of one’s own death, Serrot allowed himself the secret pleasure of going on forever. Death would be no different than sleep, and like sleep—especially in the drowsy aftermath of the pills—last no longer than a blink. Then he'd wake to that individual forever, Serrot Siul. What he didn’t allow himself to understand is that all things long to continue being themselves: Spinoza’s mountain wants to be eternally mountain; Borges’s tiger, tiger. But even mountains are mutable by time, and tigers are capable of being rubbed out of existence. That evening Serrot committed the breach of decorum of professing certainty and not ignorance, and it was on account of this sin that the Proteus entered his life to cast him to the lowest ring of hell… June 7th was the umpteenth day the sun passed over the despair of Serrot’s flesh. A Thursday. Serrot hated Thursday, not in spite of it being like all other days but because of it. “It’s a very ‘daily’ day,” he said to himself as he poured a cup of coffee. The hands trembled, and walks to the park were unadvisable in light of the speed with which Serrot’s strength had faded. The specialists claimed there was a good year or so of lung function left in Serrot, and at moments one year felt like all the time in the world. That night, he had it in mind to sit at the window and watch as the light took on an expanded form before slipping to the other side of the mountains in the west. Serrot checked the silver watch on his left wrist: 10:57 AM. It was time to water the garden. The man was spent by the effort of uncoiling the fantastic curves of the garden hose. The way it always seems to just when he’d like it least, time passed slowly. He tried to lose himself in the changing clouds and forget his discomfort in the humid June air. But there it was anyway—the decay, the sweat, the sun. Back in the study. Serrot picked up a book, thumbed through it, set it back on the shelf and picked up a new one. I’m beside myself, he reflected. A call to his doctor confirmed the suspicion: The pills can induce mild symptoms of ‘personality disorder.’ Not that Serrot believed he could be anyone less than Serrot. (For that man, the self was like a hard and enduring metal.) What it is, he assured himself, is that the medicine has made it impossible to focus on the movement from one word to the other. Serrot couldn’t read, and there were seven hours left before dusk. The thought crossed his mind: It’d be easier to dream all that away. He consulted the medicine cabinet. The melatonin went down easy with a glass of water, and the next moment he was closing his eyes in the plush of the sofa. When Serrot opened his eyes, it was dusk and light poured everywhere in the street like palace fire. He visited the garden, where he had developed the habit of staring blankly at stars and birds that are like stars. He was never amazed with what rapidity time became past. Impressions slid over him, and in certain moments he was no more complex than a stone or one of the succulents breathing in its pot. It was on the last evening of that sweltering summer that the Proteus entered the hands of Serrot Siul. (The Greeks understood the Proteus—which is capable of exhausting all possible shapes of being—as a kind of sea, since the sea continually changes to streams, rivers, lakes, then back to itself; in Buenos Aires, circa 1949, it was a two centavo coin and a symbol of all coins.) The man emerged from some dream or other, and seeing that it was time for it he went to take his medication. The moon lowered on a glade of trees outside. The sight arrested his attention as he walked past a window, though likely his movements were mechanical by now. In the kitchen, he plunged his hand into a dark drawer. That’s when he made the first contact, and it was something papery and soft under his fingertips. Serrot’s hand drew back with a cigarette. He examined the standard white and yellow stem—it had been since that distant evening in February that he last smoked one, per the doctor’s orders. Cigarettes are what had been killing him all along. I’m no further from life or death these days, Serrot reasoned poorly with himself. He didn’t question how the cigarette made its way into the cabinet, or how it was he hadn’t noticed it before. He took a seat beneath a great chestnut tree in the garden, near a bed of wildflower and vine. A fountain sprung toward the moon, and a short way up the cobblestone path crickets readied each one of them their brace and bit. The cigarette burned—steady, steady. Each time Serrot glanced at the embers, he thought, How lucky I am, it’s still there; or, What a wonderful thing, this cigarette isn’t so brief as the others. But he could only take so many draws before the tobacco and smoke set his heart to spinning, and then he went to put the cigarette out. In his sleep Serrot dreamt a pleasant dream—doubtless inspired by the Proteus—of smoking a cigarette under the chestnut and watching the stars lower. Serrot woke from the night of that dream into the late September night, thinking, How unfortunate, I’ve just missed the twilight. He pushed aside the walls in the hallway and fumbled his way through the dark of the kitchen, then pushed the door open to the brightly lit garden. Smoke unwound from the ashtray, where Serrot had left the cigarette to burn and die off. Serrot confirmed it was the cigarette from the night prior—not possible, unless it was still in fact the night prior. Nothing—not a clock or a timetable—agreed with the math of that supposition. It was then that he remembered the clerk at the market on Autumn Ave, Miklo, telling him about the chemicals that went into a cigarette. “A pack of spirits today lasts twice as long as a pack from, say, a decade ago,” Miklo noted as Serrot directed him to the brand of spirits he wanted to purchase. “Pretty soon they’ll make cigarettes that burn forever, right?” Serrot said jokingly. “That would be something wouldn’t it—ojalá.” That conversation transpired before Serrot had become sick. He hadn’t thought then about the possibility of dying young. He had only just entered his late twenties. Then it dawned on Serrot that he had never let Miklo in on the news of his condition, but let ties between them disintegrate ever since the diagnosis. Serrot’s watch read a quarter past 11 PM. He took up a coat and a flashlight and headed into the street with the cigarette in his hand. Miklo was sweeping the cobblestone courtyard that the market opened onto when Serrot arrived. “Serrot, is that you?” Miklo noticed his friend’s features transfigured, as though a decade had lapsed since they had last spoken and not a year and some months. “Miklo, ¿cómo estamos?” Serrot began—“How are the urns selling?” “Bien, bien—how are you? You look… Well nevermind that. The urns? They sell here and there… Why?” “Good, just thought… Thought I’d say hi. You see, I’m not who I was when you last saw me. I’ll be departing in the next year. I’m sick from the lungs with cancer.” Miklo set aside the sweeper and went over to help Serrot inside, and that’s when he noticed the cigarette smoldering in Serrot’s hand. It would need to be put out before they headed through the market door, he explained. Serrot flicked the cigarette to the cobblestone, where he dashed it with the sole of his foot. It kept burning afterward. Serrot went on to explain to the wonderstruck clerk that this cigarette had been burning for two nights and a day now, and that there wasn’t a chemical in the world that could explain this. “Why are you showing me this?” Miklo asked. Serrot wasn’t sure, except for that it had something to do with the need to prove that what was happening wasn’t actually happening—that the cigarette kept persisting. But Miklo’s efforts to douse the lit end with water were unfruitful, and in fact increased the terror with which Serrot regarded the cigarette. Then it was time to close the market, and all Miklo could do was send his friend off with an urn and with the advice to lose the cigarette and forget the ordeal altogether. That night, Serrot happily put aside the day and with the aid of the medication drifted into sleep. But he dreamt of smoking the cigarette under the trees and stars. Once more, he woke from the night of that dream into a late September night, and it was like water dissolving into water. Serrot circled out to the garden and was disheartened to find smoke unwinding from the ashtray. He lifted the cigarette from the ashes, turned it over, studied the cherry, then passed his judgment: The memory of this, when I look at it later, will be false—I need only to wake, to truly wake. But even here he felt the desperation of his flesh and bones and went to rest a while under the trees and sky. What were his thoughts? Big thoughts? Little thoughts? No thoughts? The man drew all that night from the cigarette, and not once did the lit end crumble or the length of it diminish. The Proteus will tell you: Serrot, believing he was in a dream, figured that cancer in dreams is rubbish—as are the lowering of the moon, the silence of the birds and stars, the gentle course of the water and the song of the crickets. The hated sense of unreality set in. The dawn signaled a day and a night since Serrot last took the medication, and as the morning sun fell in the garden Serrot Siul’s head grew unbearably light. He pressed down on his eyes for the last time, certain he would wake once more and that an end would be put to that dreadful nightmare. Then the Proteus ceased to be the cigarette burning in the dead man’s hand, and when it turned back to itself—a sea? a coin? a book? this pen?—it sent a cloud of smoke in the air where it collapsed a moment later.
Essays
"On Surrealism" By Luis Torres On the Spring of 1917, the French sculptor and painter Marcel Duchamp unsettled the world with serious and penetrating questions about what may and may not be considered art when he submitted a porcelain urinal, purchased at a store that sold plumbing fixtures, to be considered for exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The urinal was titled “Fountain” and signed R. Mutt. Duchamp thought the art piece was consistent with a vision that embraced “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice.” While “Fountain” was not admitted to the exhibition, the news of it spread until all across the world discussions were being had over tables in cafes and bars about whether Duchamp was behaving as an authentic artist or had been responsible for a hoax. Duchamp’s seemingly random or incidental choice to submit “Fountain” to a galley of “high art” may be understood in light of the art movements of the early 20th Century, most famously the one termed Dada. The French word “dada,” which translates to “hobby horse,” suggests childishness and an absurdity that is appropriate for the title of an anti-establishment movement, which sought to collapse hierarchies of value and meaning. (Apparently the word “dada” was chosen at random, and no one can be sure exactly when or by whom). The movement was both distinct and integral to Cubism and to Surrealism, as well as to other anti-art movements. All of these were the consequence of a growing need to challenge the status quo, and it was the anti-social component that lent these movements their moral sense and strange excitement. Marcel Duchamp’s treatment of everyday objects in exhibitions were consistent with the tenets of Dada, in so far as he was willing to break away from conventions, established forms and theories in aesthetics, to more freely choose, to invent. Duchamp’s decision to submit “Fountain” wasn’t random/arbitrary as much as it was inevitable, even as it spurred on projects deficient of logical antecedents. Dada was a display of dynamism and revolutionary spirit by which the Surrealists modeled their own endeavors, though they were not so readily given to nihilism. In their probing for meaning, the Surrealists, and among them their progenitor André Breton, managed to give themselves a style and formality that otherwise didn’t exist in Dada. About the style and formality, Mary Ann Caws writes: Surrealism insists on a convergence of contraries clashing against each other in an aesthetic that Pierre Reverdy signaled in the journal Nord-Sud, named for the metro line traversing Paris from North to South. Tzara [a cofounder and theoretician of Dadaism] had already called for the meeting of the yes and no on street corners, so again Dada was in a sense a forbear. And Comte de Lautréamont [a French poet], great ancestor, whose image of the sewing-machine and the umbrella on the dissection table initially brought together opposites was not forgotten. [A reader of 19th/20th Century literature may observe the Surrealist doctrine of objective chance in Lautréamont: "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on an operating table."] Other startling images include the explosante-fixe of the dancer in a pose combining stillness and speeded-up motion; and the train halted at full speed in a virgin forest. Surrealism, because it was anti-establishment, was adopted on the behalf of revolutionaries who sought to protest, often in a joyously outlandish way, the arbitrary evils that broke out during the First and Second World Wars, as well as during the Spanish Civil War and other instances of nationalist dissent and violence. Octavio Paz’s seminal work, "Sunstone", is an arresting example of this kind of protest. Specifically, Paz mourns the onset of the Spanish Civil War in a song that celebrates love and death and that overwhelms death with song and hopeful expectation. A war breaks out in a city and in the midst of the chaos a couple takes off their clothes and kisses, because “to love is to battle.” Surrealism raises love as its supreme value. Pick up an anthology, like "Milk Bowl of Feathers", and you'll be absorbed by a dreamscape where lovers come and go and tenderness is made tactile and colorful. In the poem “Dear Hazel Of Squirrelnut,” André Breton’s one wish is that his daughter be “madly loved”; and in the poem “No, Love Is Not Dead,” Robert Desnos similarly expresses a desire for love to overcome, to be at large in the world, writing: I who am Robert Desnos, to love you Wanting no other reputation for my memory on the despicable earth. Léona Delcourt authored the haunting, tragic, authentically recalled nightmare titled, “Drafts of Letters to Breton,” wherein she laments the death of a lover (not literally), his absence and, point-counterpoint, his presence. Witness the jarring sense of space and temporality in the poem: My eyes seek your eyes—aren’t they for my sky, and my lips stretch forth to breath of you my lover, cover me with bites—my hands twist together here’s the cold!—I’m afraid, André—you are there.
