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 lot of these poems were written when I wasn’t well. Poetry came to me later in life. I was really in a weird mental state and one thing that’s common among people on the schizo spectrum is this interest in mysticism and Eastern philosophies, although it’s not always the case.
I hear God’s promise of forgiveness in the babbling wine.
From the rubab, I hear the clang of Paradise’s gate.
This is the difference when we hear:
you hear the door closing, I hear it opening.
Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) was a K’iche’ Mayan poet born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala.
When you died, the grooves
in your back turned to rivers
on which I set sail everything I stole from you:
Sophomore year, our history teacher made us keep a daily journal of news headlines that caught our attention. On Friday mornings, we chose one headline each, and shared a summary of the story. A pattern soon emerged.
Midday, standing on the gray, vinyl floor of his small kitchen in Chicago’s West Side, Ozzie took a can of sardines from the cabinet and pried open the top. His flannel robe hung loose, exposing gnarled blue veins running down his legs. He stood motionless as he stared into the tin.
Lovato: I had several original titles, one of which was Digging for Salvation. Another one was Américan with an accent on the E because I stopped calling myself American long ago. As you read my book, you’ll discover I saw some horrific things done with the support of America…
I’m that carnivorous bird
that you avoid in common curves
although you desire my maniacal choir presence
you continue to fear an extinction
trope is unhinged femme / prevents me from writing / Annie Wilkes hobbles a man because bipolar, because obsessive / Dr. Robert Elliott murders because transgender, because toxic masculinity, because self-hatred
We’re erasing the whiteboard. We’re not going to drive the Pacific Coast Highway as planned. We won’t hike a trail in the Olympic Mountains, beachcomb for agates on the Oregon coast, or spot migrating shorebirds.
My friend sends a video of her newborn opening and closing her mouth, testing the length of her tongue in air and then resting it back inside its wet, warm spot. Her spit and lips make soft sounds, the closest she could get to language. I want to come closer to how she must feel. It’s snowing.
It was mid-December in Mumbai, a city with just one season, hot and humid. Yet the worn cotton curtains of the consulting room I sat in billowed with an afternoon breeze that sent icy fingers down my neck and up my spine, and a hollow cough rattled my chest. The Out-Patient Department (OPD) was crowded, and patients pressed in on me from all sides even as I feverishly attended to them.
Before curfew, Friend Bar is a G.I. hangout. After curfew, it belongs to us, the expats. We think of it as our private after-hours dive tucked away on the second floor of a broken-down building in a seedy part of Seoul.
dawn at the train station:
hushed voices scatter last night’s news
into the air like goldfish the
morning light plucks it pours
it over pillars & swims at your feet.
I hadn’t read many memoirs before I started to write my own. When my agent Barbara Berson said, “You’ve got a nonfiction book here.” It was scary for me to say, “This is not a fictionalized world.” I hadn’t gone out of my way to read anything in preparation for writing it.
Four girls in five years, wow, did you plan that? Do they all have the same father? Are you going to try for a boy? Have you figured out where babies come from?
He’s poised with a notepad and pen on top of legs crossed tight like braids. He repeats the question, “When did you find out your father was the main suspect?”
The therapist sits in front of his motivational posters, the ones that frustrate me with their cornball optimism.
Let’s not read into it, but I got into my first and only car crash the same day I tried to move to the city where you live. I sat numb in the left lane with a bruise across my breastbone, holding up traffic, hood smoking on the hot tarmac until the tow truck came to haul me back home.
Seuss: I have a Master of Social Work degree, and I was a therapist. I taught as an adjunct in creative writing while I was doing that, and I was raising a son—a lot of that time as a single parent. I realized that to not go crazy, I had to think of everything as “of the piece.”
Because of the fact that I did my MFA in fiction, I actually hadn’t read that many memoirs. But then I started as a staff writer for Buzzfeed News in the fall of 2015, and one of the first pieces that I wrote for them was a genre review of trans women’s memoirs. That was when I became interested.
She’ll be dead that evening, but neither of them knows this. In her final moments, as the car flips over, she will not think of him but of her parents, of how she would give anything to spare them the pain they are about to experience.
One way, you pass a house with chickens in the yard and you think, “Ah, I’ve always wanted chickens. I’d be better with chickens.”
One way, you go everywhere by bike and live in a flap tent alone. Your thighs are sculpted like marble.
One way is full of bubbles: bathtubs, gum, champagne, Jacuzzis.
This series is a reimagining of older photographs I’ve taken with more recent polaroid’s put over top—a visual translation of the conversations an artist has with themselves, with their old work, with what they’re doing now. Everything I’ve created, whether it be visual art, sculptures, or poetry—they’re participating in one conversation, stacking up meaning.
My deepest influences are found equally within the surrealists and Outsider Art pieces such as street preacher James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. I approach painting with a conscious rawness. With reference to Outsider Art, my artistic insights meet the paint and paper with technical and emotional directness.
The digital photographs represent two series of still life images for back lit prints, Hard Flesh and Fashioned.
I’ve wandered the globe as a travel journalist for decades, often watching the world and its people from behind; whether in the hub of London, a backstreet in Havana, or alone from a window in a squat hotel room in Paris; whether with a 35 mm camera or an iPhone.
The series results from numerous conversations about nomadic life and its expressions, as experienced by the artists on the move. Within the paradigm of continuous “new beginnings” and “ending chapters,” we are often finding ourselves, short-term and long-term, within the “grey” zone both legislation-wise and concerning the sense of belonging, with “black and white” phases, and with bright patterns of events
As I arrive at the Institute and the heater sinks me in stuffy-warm air, I realize I haven’t spoken to you in nearly six years. It’s an icy day. The snow stacks knee-high, floods walkways, turning them to marsh, and the sky is empty—pale white like a beluga whale.
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Humberto Ak'abal's website
©Violette Bule