011. DEPENDABLE WARMTH.

"i can't stop talking like you."

Welcome to ISSUE 011: DEPENDABLE WARMTH 🍦

Even the couple days where I am not, I wake up lately feeling hungover. My head floats a few inches above my body and I fumble myself out of the sheets to do the little tasks which largely occupy my days. There is uncertainty in me and the universe. Things are hot and growing, myself included. I’m undone, I’m come apart; it’s so good. I feel tired and I feel bored by things that do not fill me and then I let that stuff go. I feel stretched and pulled apart. I don’t get much sleep—I push forward, surprised by all that can happen when I’m up and open. Hair frizzing, tits out, busy, messy. It’s good to drink to the bottom of the glass; it’s great to be sore and covered in glitter. The end of the world is coming and going and so am I. I’m not afraid to be exhausting or exhausted, not shy about longing and laughing. Burning up now, this July of Julys, is exquisite. I want, I feel, I want to feel. Change is percolating and it leaves me sweaty and covered with goosebumps.

This issue of paloma is sexy and smart. Our writers think about love, gender, and relationships, teasing apart that ineffable something that connects “me” to “you” until we somehow make “us.” Dylan O. ruminates on tennis, sex, and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, recalling past loves and loses. In a short story about a man, a maid, and a dog, Vasundhara Singh subtly probes the gendered expectations of domestic labour. Poet Ceara Hennessey plays with the thin and easy-to-rupture membrane between and around the self and a loved other, while my own piece explores the space of feeling in which others draw us nearer or push us further from our self and from connection with other selves. “I make precious ephemera from the air that surrounds you,” writes poet Mila Grgas, while Janna Abbas’ poetry croons and pleads: “c o m e b a c k!” (And you will be tempted to)... “I have often thought that the only right time for me to die is in the summer,” writes Elliot Savin of this most abundant season. But it’s so easy to open up and love when the days are long and hot. As Audre Lorde once wrote,

“The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living; the only dependable warmth is the warmth of the blood.”

So we look back, take stock, and move ahead tired but tirelessly, with nothing but the dependable warmth of our blood.

Issue 012 next month marks one year of

paloma magazine

! We’re so proud of the work we’ve been able to distribute and the artists with whom we’ve had the fortune to collaborate! Thank you for sticking with us. We feel that this is cause for celebration and now is the time for the bacchanal! We would love to call out to all our artistic readers to submit their work about revelry,  pride and success. Tell us of the freedom you feel after a tremendous accomplishment. Show us streamers and balloons. Let us hear music and laughter. Let us taste wine and cake!

While our submissions are always open and we do not usually call for thematized submissions, when we think about this next issue, we think of a festival! So, join us in this little party, and see you next month for our one year anniversary issue! 

abby

| co-editor

I Beg Your Pardon? by Vasundhara Singh [Fiction]

Barefoot by Elliot Savin [Poetry]

Wherefore do you follow her by Abby Lacelle [Creative Non-Fiction]

#64 by Ceara Hennessey [Poetry]

“(where do they hide the young, tender years?)” by Janna Abbas [Poetry]

Tennis as Both Racquet Sport and Sexual Awakening by Dylan O. [Culture; Non-Fiction]

Romantic Narrative by Mila Grgas [Poetry]

I Beg Your Pardon? by Vasundhara Singh

Raja buys a bag of water chestnuts from a man smoking a beedi under a Palash tree, its red fleshy blossoms scattered at the seller’s feet. Spring blushes in its infancy. Raja has traveled eight hours from the University of Allahabad to the flower splattered streets of New Delhi. He scratches at the nape of his neck for the tweed jacket he wears is a gift from a friend whose father owns two-thirds of the land in their native village. The same land where Raja’s father toiled to grow potatoes. At half past nine in the morning tomorrow, he has to queue outside the Union Public Service Commission building and appear for his interview. It’s his second attempt and a voice inside him whispers that it won’t be his last for his medium of language is Hindi which lessens his chances at cracking the interview. He carries the bag of water chestnuts to House no. 10, Lodhi road. His lanky figure waits behind the meshed door. The house belongs to Shyam Lal Singh, a Member of Parliament from his village who has permitted Raja to spend the night in the servant quarters in the hope that this poor boy will clear the civil services. A woman in a pale blue saree just as lanky and narrow shouldered as him opens the door.

“Where is sahib?” Raja asks.

“He is in Jammu. Were you expecting him?”

They cross the lackluster living room with its brown furniture and white washed walls. He sees an empty kitchen with the tap making a drip-drip-drip in the steel sink. He follows her to the very end of a long corridor into a room lit by a mustard bulb. He places his tin trunk on the low lying bed which is wrapped in a Mickey Mouse bed sheet. “I heard you, too, are going to become a big sahib soon,” she says.

He grins uncomfortably. “Is there anyone else here?”

She looks at the long corridor behind her. “Who else would be here?”

“A man perhaps,” he blurts out and rushes past her. She follows him into the living room and watches him struggle with the latch.

“Would you like me to open the door for you?” she asks with a dry chuckle.

Without turning to look at her, he sounds a hmm.

While walking towards him, she asks, “are you afraid of women?” He doesn’t answer and inches towards the rusted mesh.

“There is another man in the house, would you like to meet him?”

Raja follows her to the kitchen where she instructs him to look behind the door. He stares for a moment. The maid gathers the sleeping puppy in her arms and brings it to Raja’s chin. “This is Babloo. The man of the house. You have no reason to worry. We both don’t bite.”

After he has changed into his old pair of kurta-pajama, he heads to the kitchen. The maid is heating up sabzi in a Kadhai while the gray puppy chews on the leaves of a radish. “I have made potatoes in a red gravy and rice. Is that enough?”

He nods with his eyes to the floor. She spreads a jute rug for him to sit on and places his dinner in front of him and leaves. After the third bite, he lets his anxiety take over. A senior at university had taught him a phrase which is uttered when the listener wants the speaker to repeat a question.

“I beg your...” Raja says, in between bites, “I beg your...”

The puppy yawns while resting its head on its front paws.

“I beg your...”

“Pardon,” the maid says from behind the door, “I beg your pardon.”

He becomes flustered and finishes the meal in three large bites. He returns to his room and stares at the Mickey Mouse for half a minute before hurrying back to the kitchen. She is rinsing his dirty plate in the sink.

“Can you repeat that line?” he asks.

“I beg your pardon.”

Once she hears the thud of his bedroom door, she crouches beside the sleeping dog and says,

“Don’t tell him you’re a bitch.”

Barefoot by Elliot Savin | Instagram

I have often thought that the only right time for me to die is in the summer. 

I want to leave when the world is at its fullest, 
when its arms are flung wide and it is gleeful. 
To leave when the grass is tall and the leaves are ample, 
when the animals are a chorus and everything is breathing. 

I want to go when time is lush and life is trembling, 
when art is everywhere and everywhere you see it. 
To go when devouring comes easy and with laughter, 
when everything is brighter than it has to be and mercy is abundant. 

Summer is when love slides easily off your tongue, 
when clouds form great kingdoms in the sky and looking up is no longer tender, 
when your beauty doesn’t hang in ribbons around your neck and you can run and sing and dance in the belly of the beast. 

I know that when the living is easiest and my skin is taught from the sun, I will step gently out the back door of the house.
Out onto the porch where these languorous limbs of mine will take me to the back field where I will greet death like an old friend. 

Wherefore do you follow her by Abby Lacelle | Substack

She is a feeling for me. Somewhere in the space between shame, regret and longing, I feel her. 

I found a bundle of her letters while looking through my file cabinet for Aidan’s passport as he packed his things to go. (He and I have a bundle now tucked in its place.) The language inside is young and tender. I wrote to others like I was pleading with them to close-read me, which I’m sure inspired these patient and mindful responses. My writing was (is?) so finicky and reactive that replies, from those who care, are written as though a stray word may fatally wound me. Death by (mis)interpretation, death by surface reading. 

Her teeth were big, plentiful, and jutting forward, holding open her mouth. She was perpetually in a half-smile, as if her lips, though full, were too thin a sheath. She was always licking, her lips maybe chafed and weary from standing sentinel for all that lay behind. In search of something, it seemed to me, her tongue flitted about. What is she thirsty for, I wanted to know. (Aidan’s mouth, by comparison, is ironically girlish, plump, and pink.) An interesting mouth that I knew I wanted to kiss, even if just to see, I told myself, how it could work pragmatically—whether our teeth would clash, whether it would be like two tightly stretched drums beating against one another. 

At acting camp, we were scene partners. We did Shakespeare, so I was myself playing a girl dressed as a boy and she was the girl who loved me. I rebuffed her, though through each other our characters channeled love for others. The director one day whispered to me that, to build chemistry, I should get up in her space during rehearsal. He and everyone watched as I pushed my chest against hers and touched my hands to her body. I played it aggressively and she played it off shy and intrigued, her mouth and mine propinquitous. I didn’t feel like I was overacting or overoccupying–just commanding what little slice of the stage we stood together in. She and I together, feeling as we liked it. Afterward, the director admonished that I should keep the same energy, but strive less for full girl-on-girl action. Get up in her space, not her. I was too eager to get close. To be too willingly in another girl’s space is basically always uncomfortable or pornographic if there aren’t boys near enough to intercept or if men are watching. You are go-betweens, stick to the script. 

Late, after dinners and the evening plays, alone in her room once we’d ran lines and exhausted casual conversation, she would tell me that she was sad and unseen. She’s blue. I wanted her to feel another way. I asked if I could try something, then leaned in and kissed her, quickly and softly, under the dim light on her bed. Percussion. This could be a different feeling. (For me? For her?) When you’re ready, this is what you do to conjure a feeling: close the gap. She smiled (or, her lips remained slightly parted as always which I heartily received as smile). Her mouth, retreating and moving to form words which now escape me, lingers in my memory while the rest of the night is elsewhere. 

That summer I kissed Michael in the rec. room on the last day of camp. Before I’d creep into her room and take up her time, I’d sit next to him and hold his hand during the plays. Michael was a sensible outlet—closer at hand and more distant. When we Skyped in the weeks following our returns to our respective homes, he recommended I listen to Death Cab for Cutie (I need you so much closer…) and watch Fight Club, and I did. I took him in passively and eventually stopped responding. She and I didn’t video or call to talk about music and film; we wrote slow and deliberate, long and revealing, letters about ourselves and posted them to each other. I told her I could not eat, that I might (want to) die. She worried. She wrote to me about her siblings and about her pets and about being alone. I worried. Feelings persisted though letters eventually stopped.

At eighteen, I went to Toronto to spend the weekend with my boyfriend, JT. He knew books and music; he could talk about things. I had hours to kill before he would arrive and we would go together to his sister’s; I was not used to being in the city by myself. I ate ice cream over nitrogen. I bought records. I picked up two brown paper-wrapped bouquets of sunflowers. She waited for me in a park, to keep me company. When she met me, she fed me grapes and we talked about the time in between meetings. We remembered to each other. I took her photo and thought of her beautifully. She took the sunflowers from my hands and I walked away forgetting all the particulars. I put the feeling out of mind for years. JT broke up with me.

Aidan knew just about everything about everything and could explain it if you asked and he felt like it. Films, history, geopolitics. I asked about sexuality and the question bounced back to me. She came to mind like the opening to Rocky Horror, so I mentioned her but didn’t realize the connection without encouragement. He dislodged the feeling, bringing me closer to it and him by extension. I then remembered the intimacy so hard that I reworked it. I thought of our closeness at length, such that it became something unfriendly, something to disclose to a new love. When I was younger, I wanted badly to tell her everything and to have everything be known. I craved Aidan so earnestly that I got drunk and dropped her a line. Were we in love? Rereading the messages, it definitively appears that I am saying goodbye before I off myself. She, on the other hand, is unreachable. I am angry with her for not being more nervous that I might have been strung to a noose. We used to read each other seriously. In the letters we wrote as children, she was more deliberately anxious for me and I was just as unintentionally pathetic. I think I might have loved you. It is the specificity of this love that matters, but remains largely unarticulated. Now, diluted as well. We recalled the kiss differently, though we agreed that I did it. She confessed to having felt nothing. I might be a memory and I may have meaning, but I’m not a feeling to her. It meant a lot to me too, in different ways.

At a counter protest to conservative transphobes, she spotted me and reached out online after the fact to say as much, but nothing more. She wasn’t sure to have known me to see me at first. There has been change. Her Instagram indicates she is engaged to be married. 

At my local farmer’s market, a few weeks ago, she was collecting signatures for a pro-Palestinian action. I was with Aidan and “our” dog (now “my” dog), and she shouted for me from across the way, this time knowing me. She wanted my signature. I spoke rapidly and with levity then hurried into the market to buy salsa and jam and sunflowers. I signed for her the way I always did before closing off my letters, quick scribbles charged with heat. I don’t remember if we touched at all, and I can’t mind if Aidan spoke to her or felt the tugging triangulation, but I handled the pen, she went off with my writing and Aidan left shortly thereafter. He and I were together five years and discussed getting married this fall. This is what I have to write.

It is too big and singular. If close, immediate, and without witness, it is too painful. This feeling–a buffer room where desire is spread out and liminal—is dense and accessed with trepidation. It would debilitate to long without the remove–without the waiting bundle and the tortured but gradual materialization of the past and its overdrawn words, its convoluted constellations. She creeps up around inside me when I’m scared that I won’t be understood or when I rethink everything to the point of learning that I never have been. She is the feeling in me of taking up/in too much, my love for longing without release. I close the space between us when I need to feel more between myself and others. She is a feeling I have about myself.

#64 by Ceara Hennessey | Instagram

in fairness, the sutures were splitting long before this. 
no security, never safe. 

i lifted my hands in prayer. i noticed things, stayed quiet. 
stayed holy and devout. 

stayed good good. raised you so right that i became you 
somehow. 

and now i can’t stop talking like you, saying girls and 
fast and water like that. 

it’s funny, i sling east as the limelighted jester, all 
because the breakdown 

was mine. but you, who pocketknifed, who trifled 
through my offerings 

like a kid exhuming sand for a buried plaything,
you get to remain seated. 

mimic anguish, earn the pleasure of watching something 
you created come alive

anonymous. not to get all 21st century, but that’s the
problem with you men.

you run out of the room with your candle still burning,
still dripping wax, flame admixing air.

“(where do they hide the young, tender years?)” by Janna Abbas | Instagram

Tennis as Both Racquet Sport and Sexual Awakening by Dylan O. | Substack

Spoilers for Challengers (Guadagnino, 2024) to follow

It wasn’t until I started app-based online dating that I learned David Foster Wallace not only wrote at length about tennis but was also a tennis virtuoso. For this I owe all my thanks to a man from Hinge whose profile said “Ask me about postmodernism!,” which I did. I’m not at all embarrassed by this.

On our second date he gave me his copy of String Theory, a collection of DFW’s essays on the sport, and I wondered: What kind of move is this? But after I finally sat down and read it, I texted him to confirm our third date (“Hiii”). For the first time, I had come across writing that accurately, terrifyingly articulated the agonies of tennis: a built-in geometry problem, its faithful relationship with the elements, its expeditious exposure of your concealed psychodramas. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote on DFW: “Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding.”

Tennis is a nearly impenetrable sport. It’s inaccessible (costs are high and courts are sparse); frustrating to learn; dipping in popularity, though recovering slightly during the pandemic; and impossible for even its most gifted practitioners to make a living from, save for a few fabulously wealthy individuals at the top of the rankings. It reminds me of psychoanalysis: fussy and old-fashioned, deeply misunderstood by the public, subsidized by the wealthy — and, today, seething at shinier, bouncier, lesser modern alternatives (pickleball). And it’s a shame because tennis and its unusual variant of navel-gazing, much like psychoanalysis, can be wielded to better understand yourself.

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers wields tennis as a device to understand its subjects as well. The film depicts the fictional story of three rising tennis stars sublimating their covert libidinal desires for each other into jockeys for athletic superstardom. Zendaya leads as Tashi Duncan, a generational talent with doomed career prospects, and her two male cohorts: Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), rising stars in the sport captured into Tashi’s orbit.

Challengers takes place in present-day at Phil’s Tire Town Challenger and culminates in a showdown between the now estranged Art and Pat in the final match of the tournament. Spliced throughout are febrile time-skips in which Guadagnino traces back as far as 13 years to recap the burgeoning, sometimes smoldering, but mostly flopping, love affair between the three leads. 

The film understands that tennis, while rooted in the present, cannot be separated from the events of the past. That’s obvious, of course. Think of the hours professionals spend on a practice court, strength-building in physiotherapy, and doing physical conditioning. But few speak of the game’s tendency to summon parts of a player’s unconscious that aren’t typically accessible — traumas, fears, and fantasies. A tennis match, a very good one, can be observed as a memoir of the player; how they show up on court is how they show up in the rest of their life. Writing about tennis, John McPhee says in Levels Of The Game: “a person’s tennis game begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and characteristics of play… if he is flamboyant, his game probably is, too.”

Everything you may keep hidden from others, even unreconciled sexual feelings, can show up through tennis. This sport is, in fact, the perfect venue for that. For SSENSE, Eric Schwartau writes: “... the sexual undertones of tennis — the chemistry and rhythm derived from playing a worthy opponent — offers gratification, falling somewhere between witty banter and good sex.” In his memoir Open Andre Agassi is more direct when discussing playing with Steffi Graf: “… though we’re forty feet apart. Every forehand is foreplay.” The sport isn’t necessarily sexual from inception, at least on its own. Rather, as we see in Challengers and in real-world tennis, players assign readymade psychological dramas and sexual bends to their game, giving it new, alternative meaning.

The film has gone viral for the homoeroticism between its two male leads. Early on we see a young Art and Pat secure the U.S. Open Boys’ Doubles Championship and fall into an extended and intimate celebration, one toppling over the other. Later they engage in a near-threesome, pleasuring each other while Tashi observes like a Wattpad puppeteer. The film’s many flashbacks act as a supercut of reveries of unreconciled desire between the two men: phallic foods, leg-grabs, and other gay ephemera.

When I turned 15 my father moved our family from a small town to a medium town, to one whose high school had a tennis program. By that time I had already played for five years — only casually, but I showed promise. When I tried out for the varsity team in my sophomore year at my new school I figured I had a better chance of making the starting bench if I set my eye on doubles instead of the more popular singles positions. I needed a partner and so I propositioned the tall, brown-haired boy whose parents owned “Ellis’s Desserts,” a local bakery where I spent my weekends idling in the corner after my mother was hired to provide extra help. Sometimes Ellis and I ventured out to hit, but we were no more than cordial with each other; my mother simply worked for his family. But Ellis was in my grade, he played well, and I realized I wanted to be around him more often.

Together we began elbowing our way up the varsity ladder, upsetting established seniors and crushing freshman cans. In Challengers, Art and Pat are shown as a formidable doubles pair, lending credibility to their chemistry, but Ellis and I had no such joie de vivre. After securing our spot on the starting bench we lost almost every match we played during our short-lived tenure.

But that’s not all we did. I don’t remember how it started, but at some point Ellis and I started fooling around with each other in secret. It happened first in the locker room then in the chaparral behind school, with coastal sage scratching the back of our thighs as we undressed. Neither of us were gay at the time (as far as I know, Ellis still isn’t). And, to be clear, we never had actual sex; everything we did circumscribed the idea of it.

In a tennis match, two players stand over 70 feet apart and engage in a sweaty duel of attrition. There is no sport quite so isolating in its intimacy. Schwartau says: “There is a comically tragic aspect to tennis: You show up to play with another person, but as you walk onto the court you find yourself alone.” Sexual situations with Ellis were almost a facsimile of a tennis match in that we were only looking, almost never touching, even as we co-created a scene, our private moment.

In a monologue during Challengers Tashi comments on a recent match, and her opponent: “For about 15 seconds there, we were actually playing tennis,” she says. “We went somewhere really beautiful together.” This leads her to the conclusion, the driving motivation of her character, that these intimate conditions are what’s necessary for “good fucking tennis.” She echoes DFW with this assessment. Writing about tennis in Infinite Jest he says: “The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance.”

But is tennis ever just tennis? Well, in a steamy penultimate scene with Art and Pat nude in a sauna, one soundly rejects the other’s advance, and the two trade barbs. There is enough ambiguity in the dialogue to keep the film nestled in the territory of veiled eroticism. Are they talking about their oscillating desires, or their looming match? It’s not clear what either man wants; it’s libidinal, but it’s not necessarily sex. The film suggests their need for something deeper — an integration, perhaps, in true psychoanalytical fashion. What they need is a coming together that can only be achieved through tennis.

Ellis and I never achieved a resolution, but we did lose a lot of matches. Maybe a covert fantasy was all either of us needed, the misty arousal of knowing that everything was permissible even if nothing was possible. Neither of us were prepared to take things all the way. Truthfully, I was not ready to confront my sexuality in high school. And maybe there was a utility to Ellis’s edging for me, one in which the potentiality of sex helped obscure my resentment for the losses we accumulated.

Art and Pat’s face-off at the end of Challengers encapsulates a decade plus of negotiations of their relationship. Through tennis and the odyssey of the match, they rediscover the other. The film cuts to black during a final set tiebreak, which is about as close to a gladiatorial fight-to-the-death as tennis can produce, after a cat and mouse short court rally that ends with Tashi roaring in approval while the two men embrace, integrated once again.

After graduation Ellis and I never saw or talked to each other again (on purpose) until, two years ago, I saw him at the local library, sitting on his phone.

I reached out over text: “Ellis, were you at the library today? Lol”

He replied: “Hey! I was. That’s so random.” Then a follow-up text: “How have you been? We should play tennis sometime. I’m rusty, but it might be fun.” 

We met up, played, and went back to his apartment where we sat next to each other on his couch, knees touching, not saying a word. The air was still, but the inside of my head was a flicker film with quick frames of our bare skin. I told him it was nice to see him, said goodbye, and left. I haven’t seen Ellis since. When I flash back to our time together I think: We could have been so much better, we should have been. Better in what way? Well maybe, as Tashi says, there could have been some “good fucking — tennis.”

Romantic Narrative by Mila Grgas | Portfolio | Instagram | Substack

Fuck you and your romantic narrative and feigned fragility and easy corruption and minute difference
I want whole-ity. 
Despite my uninterest in purity, 
I still pull on edges 
let strings of sweaters go taut in my hand 
I know desire. I know it without you. 
My original sin has always been turning nothing into something, 
It has always been creation that is reserved for God and mothers. I am neither.
I make precious ephemera from the air that surrounds you. 

I like resemblance. 
I mine soft jewels from the goopy portion of my artery, 
I sell them to the first person who reminds me most of you, 
I remain selfish. 
Since I have calloused over the soft 
places you used to love. 
I do not quiver from hearing your name. 
Tried and failed and stopped the endless enduring punishment. 

It was a yellow flower in my pocket 
flattened in the weeks since our meeting. 
All the good parts of you, 
something I can make someone out of. 
The song you tapped into the space between my thumb and my wrist. 

Prediction and preference. 
The types of men that have something I want. 
I would not wish death on your beautiful love story 
Or your beautiful blonde daughters 
and a happiness that will stretch far and wide into your DNA’s past and future. 
All of us changing each other’s blood chemistry and 
making our descendants seek out men of similar caliber.
I shed tears for the uniqueness of her name. 
I know you will have a big beautiful life. 

Good old-fashioned fantasy. 
I will make it all so easy for you. 
I will make myself easy 
for you. 
I am 
easy for you. 

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