“I wish I could say I had a strategy. I clung to poetry like a lifeline in my grief, and what got written, got written. I will say that, early on in the grieving process that followed my boyfriend’s suicide, I wrote a lot of catalog poems. Writing in lists at that stage makes sense.” – Jenn Koiter
When the apocalypse comes, I won’t be allowed to have Cheerios anymore. Not because at the end of the world, there will be no breakfast cereal, but because if the world doesn’t end, my sister actually thinks there will still be beds to make and carpets to vacuum, and she says she’s tired of stepping on the little O’s that I just can’t seem to keep in my bowl.
Mindlessly scrolling through TikTok, whether at my desk, leaning against the kitchen counter, on the couch, or on my bed, makes me feel disconnected. My body is curled up, knees close to my heart, and my shoulders are tense below my ears. My eyes are locked, all background noise essentially muted. All of my attention is focused on the little screen in my hand.
If you sing to periwinkles, it coaxes them out of their shell.
I don’t know if this is actually true. It may well be a myth passed down to Maine children, who explore tide pools that form temporarily in the divots and cracks of rocks. In fact, writing it down like this really makes it seem like a myth.
As a child, my oldest sister kept a cage of guinea pigs in the garage, and she’d made a deal with the produce manager at the Lucky down the street—well not really a deal; he just gave her all the expired lettuce, which she fed to them. On weekends, she took them out of their cage and let them run around on the lawn…
You’re at the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, scanning the spines of the memoir section, when you notice a familiar name. But the name isn’t familiar to you as an author. You recognize her name because she’s the former wife of the second richest person in the world. You pinch the book by its spine, pull it out from the shelf, flip it to the back cover, and there she is—Mackenzie Bezos.
I envy people who can go to sleep by midnight. Who can get under their warm covers and feel their skin touch the smooth surface of their sheets and know that soon they will drift off to a night of dreams, leaving their questions or compulsive thoughts for the next day. I envy them because I simply cannot follow such a routine.
It was a Friday night in the second year of the pandemic, and I was up late, drinking beers, watching old reruns of the comedy-drama series M*A*S*H. I pressed play on an episode where Colonel Henry Blake receives an honorable discharge and gets his orders home. He makes a round of heartfelt goodbyes to everyone in the unit, especially his trusty sidekick, Radar, before departing.
A paradox is something that contradicts itself. It seems that all human beings are a paradox within themselves. People hold on to their own moral sense of right and wrong, yet go against it every day. This pattern unleashes us to many different paradoxes of human behavior. We see this loop show itself in many aspects of life, such as defense mechanisms, hypocrisy, and the commonly known paradox of choice.
[Content warning: sexual assault]
How strange to be an adult this time around, to have the vocabulary to describe what took place in my body, to have enough self-esteem to tell myself: You deserved better than that. “I mean, is it really that prevalent? Does it really happen this often?”
“Yes,” the nurse said simply. “It happens all the time.”
It must have been hard, growing up with transparent skin,
when even then, no one wanted to look at your still-beating heart,
your outstanding insides
rotting in rainbow colors.
Everyone else was getting X-rays
When she died, they were buttery smooth and still, and buried under mine, palms pressed flat against dry, cotton hospital sheets. I suffocated them with my grief, pressing the fear of going on living without her into the skin, into the stiffness of the bed. When she entered the hospital just days before, they had been trembling…
Like the salmon, who start their home in freshwater and migrate to the ocean then return home to spawn and die, our internal celestial soul maps are not determined by passports and borders.
Clare is alone in the hotel swimming pool when the boy and girl appear, hand-in-hand, at the door in the tall perimeter gate protecting the pool and its authorized users from everyone else.
The boy speaks first–he’s a man, really, somewhere in his mid-twenties, sandy-haired and hefty-jawed, a wad of gum stuck in his cheek.
An infant, I startle, flinch, and boom
When she touches me. Burning pistol,
Little shrimp.
She says, years later,
“It only takes one bad shrimp
No matter how smart or self-sufficient you are, the day may come when someone else takes care of you. Someone will give you medicine, drive you to doctors’ appointments, take control of your finances, and change the batteries in your hearing aids.
I did a lot of research on human experimentation. I enrolled in several soft contact research studies because I did need to know two things: how it felt to be in a research study and what an ethical, by the book research study looked like. At the same time, I was reading a lot about how most of our knowledge about gynecology is based on deeply unethical methods.
Past the dry cornfields and cobblestone roads, surrounded by forests barren of leaves, lay the sleepy village of Lumbrow where rats scurried down the streets. A rumor about a mysterious key swirled in the village square and tangled in crooked branches. Supposedly, the key was buried in the dark woods, but no one in Lumbrow knew anything about it.
I cut my life into small slices
And freeze them, to prevent them
From going bad like bread, or coffee.
With my life too, I keep my hand hovered
Over its railing, close enough to grab,
The journey south is always easier. A northern haul is cruel. See those trees leafing plastic shopping bags; that is how they see us. The soft gifted thin tents and sleeping bags. If lucky, a truck will stop, open a freezer gate, conduct us elsewhere, the fence will already be cut, the police baton will wave and not shatter as jackhammers may brick.
scrambled. For weeks, I’ve been nursing a strange, unproductive, overwhelming urge to egg my abusive ex-boyfriend’s house. Strange because I am not usually one to waste food, especially on rotten people. Unproductive because revenge fantasies are only so cathartic, especially when you don’t intend to act them out. Overwhelming because, well. It’s all I think about.
The world was on fire and men were to blame. Not all men, of course. The
book club members said this reflexively, as though Marc still attended.
“Men aren’t empathetic enough,” Allison said and glanced at Joanna,
who may or may not have voted for Trump. There had been whispers.
Joanna leaned in, “You know who should be in charge? Women!”
Born in May 1967, pre- “Summer of Love,” I am the child of quintessential hippies. My mother taught me everything I know about being laid-back, peace-loving, and eccentric. My mom, who legally changed her name to Bunee (like a rabbit), named me Sunee (like a sunny day). People used to comment, “Your names are so cute!” when they heard our names.
-For friends and for myself.
The tip of my pen leaks forgiveness.
Jotted spaces between lined pages, I seek your redemption.
My encapsulated words remind me, I swallow
memories like the Xanax you popped, and the whiskey you chugged to forget me.
No one wakes up one day and says, “I want to be a witch.” Except for me. I had been an atheist for a couple of years, delving away from my Christian path in secret. Magick, or the natural use of energy to produce change, is a big “no no” in the Christian community, but I always wondered why.
Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) was a K’iche’ Mayan poet born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala.
I’m that carnivorous bird
that you avoid in common curves
although you desire my maniacal choir presence
you continue to fear an extinction
Then, I glowed lattice and ladder.
A boddice of between. In the dark I left the ground.
My gender cutting holes in shadows. Portholes
and gloryholes. Meeting selves on the other side.
Across an invented expanse, nothing arrived
Here in the grotto, we whisper like sinners sipping on wine stolen from a stocked cabinet or an under-staffed supermarket with broken cameras—ours for the taking. Our secrets are coated in fermented, besotted grape juice, brains buzzing and swollen against our skulls, the rest of us just as desperate to be free.
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
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Humberto Ak'abal's website
©Violette Bule