018. PLAYTIME.
"i didn't think it could just end."
Welcome to ISSUE 018: PLAYTIME 🏠
Look around you. At least to the extent that you are able to, since your body is now stiff plastic to which your head is attached by a peg. You’ll soon find out that the hard, immobile elements of your new anatomy did not come together when purchased at the toy store, but were experimentally Frankenstein’d into a new configuration. This doesn’t greatly matter, though. At least you are not the dismembered plush dog to your right, or the poney hanging by its hooves from the ceiling fan, covered in what seem to be prison tattoos. You remember the nursery rhymes, their hidden messages of religious persecution, executions, and bridges falling down. This is it, all around you and in all its glory, even more macabre in the stillness of night. It feels good. This smell of satiated passion, of raw human emotions expelled and left oozing on the fortress-shaped Lego—it’s familiar. From down here, the chaos looks so different. But you still recognize your childhood bedroom.
The truth displayed in a child’s play area is hidden, its landscape a language we stop speaking as we get older, gaining rather than losing naiveté when it comes to the real, uncorrupted human eagerness expressed in naked dolls with chewed-off noses, bald teddy bears, and a toy train tragically crashed into the living room of a wall-less dollhouse, rendering an entire Sylvanian family homeless. Deprived of this outlet, no wonder our adult bodies store tension in neck muscles and carpal tunnel syndromes. We’ve forgotten that to create is to separate, destroy, re-assemble, dissect, and transform.
Thankfully we have words, thankfully we have art. A poem’s tension mirroring the condensed experience of being four, five, seven, nine… What are writers, and artists, if not mad-scientist children creating universes out of found things? Words written are like bread crumbs left behind for our younger selves to find, in resolute hope they’ll do better when finding their way this time around.
Welcome to ISSUE 018: PLAYTIME. This month, Vasundhara Singh analyzes what it means to kill something small(er than you) in “How To Get Rid of It.” ’s poem “Son of Laertes” uncovers the epic in the daily pains and joys, wondering “why I thought I might live forever.” James Dunnigan, from scalpelled skulls to schoolyards “no one plays in,” delights and discomforts us with his “Neurosongs.” Meanwhile, nurtures an all-consuming, domesticity-disturbing friendship with sparrows in “tweed tweed.” and Ishma Fahim’s visual art stirs up distant and partially forgotten, partially invented, memories. The protagonist in Eve Carcas’ “DOLLSHOUSE” clings to control, reaches for the comfort of toys to mediate feelings. But things are not what they seem—are they ever? Finally, ’s “The Flame at the Back of My Throat: Footnotes to a Poem” reminds us that form is, ultimately, to be played with.
| poetry editor
Son of Laertes by Larkspur [Poetry]
Neurosongs by James Dunnigan [Poetry]
How to Get Rid of It by Vasundhara Singh [Fiction]
tweed tweed. by Julieta Blanco [Fiction]
Slip a stitch; Three’s a crowd; and You tell me you love me. I tell you I do too (We are both liars) by Ishma Fahim [Visual Art]
DOLLSHOUSE by Eve Carcas [Fiction]
The Flame at the Back of My Throat: Footnotes to a Poem by Zane Perdue [Poetry]
Son of Laertes by Larkspur | Substack | Instagram
There is an old man sitting alone
On a bench.
Before him are trees I have seen grow old and curl in
On their shadows on the cats buried beneath them
Three-should-be-four
Argos is in limbo and has been put on ice until
The old man gets up to be Odysseus again
There is a set to my father’s face these days
The look of things that are not dying but think they are
Children cry so hard because they think they will be stuck
With the pain the scrape the bruise the skinned knee
Forever
It hurts it hurts it hurts
We do not grow up so much you know we cannot
Fathom what it is to not be
What it is to be not
I have been unconscious nineteen times in my life
I believe
I have lost count in fact
I do not know if it is like dying but if it is then
Well
At least we will not remember that passage
We will simply be and then not be
To go forever must be a strange thing
Tip over the edge of that waterfall and not see where it ends
Perhaps I will not peer over my children’s shoulders as
They sift through my boxes and get rid of that one thing
I loved that they didn’t like and keep that one thing they
Admire and I abhor
Such is the way of children
I wonder why I thought I might live forever
Not really but
I didn’t think it could just end. There had to be something
Sick days will do that to you I suppose
You have to be paid back for the fevers
If I have a spirit I hope it goes on walks through Muir Woods
I hope it isn’t angry
Or at least no angrier than when I was alive
I hope I can sit next to my dad
On his redwood bench and watch
The trees sift through the breeze for precious things.
He can talk to me
I don’t care what about
Just that comforting old-man voice and
Big warm hands that held mine when mine were so small
And that way of gesturing so enthusiastic
The smile that aligns his teeth so funny
The set of his shoulders rounded like mine like his dad’s
That brilliant mind with its gears all switched round
Those pants with stapled hems those odd socks
Those worn-through undershirts that bad self-done haircut
O come home Odysseus
You have been gone these twenty years
I am Telemachus I have left home to search for you
Across the ocean even when your body stays home
I have heard the stories of you told by your friends
And enemies
Of your legacy your genius your cantankerous temper
I have sat at the tense shoulders of your Penelope
Weaving weaving weaving
Ithaka falling into the sea
Green garden hoses ushering water from the
Eaves buckets catching the drips in the study an
Old woman bailing out her driveway alone at midnight in
A stylish brown raincoat her younger self bought that is
Still a beautiful luxury to her with its crisp accordion hood
Twenty years and an inheritance later
Never takes anything for granted
Still waiting for you to come home
I have set sail I will come back and watch you
Murder the suitors if you please but I know what will happen
I see you now, bad knee stretched out before you,
Watching the birds from your father’s chair.
You fiddle with the finger you broke years ago that
Healed wrong
You think about childhood
You think about your child—
“Ten years briefly vanished”
Inside there is a sandwich ham and romaine and mayo
On the plate you keep on the drainboard
Or microwave potstickers in a glass bowl
Or maybe you’ve gotten In-N-Out and thought of me
At Nestor’s table hearing stories of your youth
There is a video open on one tab, a film review
Beneath it there is a nervous article old people like to read
And to the left is Terminal where you type in commands
As though the computer hasn’t evolved yet
No photos in your house haven’t gotten round to it
Just the ones we send you
Hard for Odysseus to get to Fedex Print
He’s busy
Stay there, then, son of Laertes
I’ll wait.
Neurosongs by James Dunnigan | Instagram
How to Get Rid of It by Vasundhara Singh
“We cannot throw it anywhere,” he says to his older brother.
“Where do people generally throw it?” asks the older brother.
The younger one shrugs. There aren’t many empty grounds in their town and the stream that joins the Narmada River to the East is barricaded due to a warning of flash floods. They walk past residential houses where people snore or argue. The younger boy looks down at it but sees nothing except an outline in the dark of night. They have been dreading this task for the past week—since their grandmother beat up their mother. This was the case last time as well. Their father, a soldier stationed at the India-Bangladesh border, was home when his mother began spitting abuses at their mother. He gave the boys a hundred Rupees and asked them to get rid of it. The boys walked up to the stream and thought of letting the mouth of the Narmada swallow it, but the younger one began to howl. His friend had told him this was a sin. They went back home and returned it to their mother who was cleaning blood from her shins. Their grandmother hissed for days and began to pray. She believed her late husband’s actions (he used to sleep with prostitutes on Tuesdays) must be the reason behind her family’s misfortune.
The stream is generous. It has taken many its during its lifetime. The stream never complains of grief—much like the people of this town. The boys (“You will be men in a few years,”barked their grandmother, “you must show some courage”) must remain steady and calm like the stream. After all, it is only a little thing. If you squint your eyes, you cannot even see it. The family that lives in the three-storey house just a few steps away from them has got rid of it twice and they seem happy. In fact, the boys have never seen any of the family members upset. That means getting rid of it does not alter one’s brain chemistry. It cannot be a so bad because the family who lives in the three-storey house just bought a bike. The sound of cri-cri-cri of crickets fills the slightly moist air of July and the boys walk out of the residential colony. The older one carries it because the younger one refuses to. He does not want to get attached to it. The burden must not weigh down his heart. A few hundred meters away they see a patch of dry mud surrounded by eucalyptus trees. The only issue is the yellow glow of the streetlight.
“Take that stone,” the older one instructs the younger one, “and throw it at the light.”
“I can’t throw that high!”
“Fine then, hold it,” he offers it to him, “I will throw the stone.”
The younger one shakes his head with pouty lips.
“What now?”
“I can’t hold it,” he says, “If I hold it that means I have sinned.”
“We have already. It does not matter if you hold it or not. ”
The younger boy asks his brother to lay it on the ground. The older one picks up a stone and throws it high in the air towards the light. The bulb smashes with a spark. For a moment, they freeze but once darkness surrounds them, they giggle. The younger boy asks, “do we bury it?”
The older one nods. “Start digging.”
The boy has been digging with his hands and a long stone for half an hour. It is no bigger than a large loaf of bread so they may not need to dig so deep. The older boy looks around to make sure no one is coming. Their grandmother must be waiting for them back home. She must have stationed herself in front of the statue of Lord Krishna and Goddess Saraswati to pray for the smooth execution of the task. They aren’t scared of the police because they know a few officers who have gotten rid of their its. “Is this enough?” he asks looking up at his older brother. The older brother bends down to examine the shallow depression and congratulates his younger brother on digging well. “Put it inside,” the younger one says, “what are you waiting for?” The older one feels a tightness in his gut, but he places it in the depression. The boys start covering it with handfuls of dry earth. They do this slowly and in silence. The younger boy wonders whether flowers will grow in this patch of land. The older one worries whether a stray dog will dig it out and eat its fifteen-day old flesh.
“What are you getting rid of?” asks a sweet voice behind the blinding brightness of a mobile phone’s flashlight.
The boys leave the task and cover their faces with their muddy hands. The flashlight showers white light over the ground.
“Oh,” the voice says, “did your parents tell you that baby girls make good manure?”
The boys say nothing. From the light, they see her bright pink saree and golden toenails in white slippers. At this time of night, a well-dressed woman on the street is either a ghost or a whore. She is the latter, the boys think to themselves. She must have been visiting one of the houses in the nearby colony. Their grandmother gave them a wad of cash to bribe whoever, a security guard, a constable, or a beggar, if they are caught. The older boy offers the cash to the woman, but she doesn’t take it.
“Does she have a name?” she asks.
“It is not a she,” the younger one says, “It is an it.”
“Who told you that?”
“Our grandmother did. It does not become a she till it can talk.”
“She is always a she.”
The older boy elbows him to stop chit-chatting. He clears his throat, “why don’t you take the money and leave us alone?”
“I don’t need your money,” says the woman.
For a minute or so, the three say nothing. They hear crickets singing. The woman continues, “what you both are doing is a sin.”
“Who are you to tell us about sin?” says the older boy with his bony chest thrust forward.
“Why?” the woman asks, “why can’t I lecture you on sin?”
The younger boy feels the urge to pee. He crosses one leg over the other.
“Because...you are a...whore.”
The woman laughs. “A whore does not commit any sins. You know why? Because she does not hide her crimes like the rest of you—you sin and act like saints.”
The older boy imagines his grandmother in front of porcelain statues of Gods and Goddesses.
The younger boy asks, “If we bury it...her here, do you think flowers will grow?”
The woman shakes her head. “Boy, if we keep burying baby girls, soon there will be no flowers anywhere in this town.”
The boys look down at the ground where their sister lies in a shallow depression. “You boys are too young,” she says. “Go home...I will bury her.” The boys swallow hard and start walking away. The older boy tries to offer her money, but she orders them to leave before someone comes. She waits for the boys to turn towards the lane of the residential colony before she crouches to the dry mud. She brushed off bits of earth from the small face and body. She checks for a heartbeat.
When they enter the courtyard of their house, their grandmother gallops towards them with an incense stick in her hand, its white smoke snaking its way around her wrinkled neck. “Have you gotten rid of it?”
The older boy nods. The younger boy says, “We have got rid of her—it...it.”
tweed tweed. by Julieta Blanco | Instagram | Substack
It all started with a tweet-tweet.
It was a dialogue. One tweet-tweet, another responding. I approached the door-window that leads to the balcony. The sound so close, almost inside my home. They fell silent as I opened the door and stepped out. I stayed quiet for a minute, maybe two, then I heard them again. A crack in the brick wall, a perfect little hollow I had never noticed before–that’s where the dialogue was.
After a while, they resumed their calm conversation. I still couldn’t see them. I sat in the balcony chair where I usually sit to drink maté. With my senses on high alert, I tried to make myself invisible. I wanted to know everything.
Out of nowhere, a sparrow flew out and landed on a tree overwhich my balcony looked out. That’s why I chose this place. I like the city. I like the forest.
At work, the mannequins lay in heaps. Wigs, severed arms, torsos discarded like husks. Chinese-lettered trucks dumped them out, a tide of plastic bodies. Something stirred in my stomach: a revulsion. A news story I had heard recently echoed in my mind, and something inside me broke. Because my maternal family came from the countryside, surrounded by animals, I grew up among them. I can’t help but get curious, enraptured, when I see any animal, especially birds.
My mom once told me that neighbors from the farm next door had gifted her a pair of geese. The geese raised their young, the young multiplied, and eventually, there were a hundred geese flying and living in a lagoon by her house. After the encounter with the sparrows, I started waking up in the morning, making coffee, and going out to the balcony, no matter how freezing the winter, to watch them. At first, I was merely a witness. They got used to me. They carried on with their lives. The yard below was like a shopping mall for sparrows—seeds fallen from sunflower plants, walnut shells, twigs, and threads, all for their nests in the hollow wall. Then I started researching: What do sparrows eat? How to entertain your sparrow? How to talk to your sparrow? Do they speak different languages? I asked my mom for my uncle Chueco’s number. He’s lived on a farm in Lonquimay forever, the biggest bird enthusiast I know. Peacocks on the roof, African hens, violent lapwings in the corners, pheasants that shouldn’t be there. Could I ask him about the sparrow genocide during the Chinese Great Leap Forward? How many sparrows were massacred last century? He knew birds, but not those stories. And he’d tell my mom, share my thoughts. No, this had to remain a secret.
I placed sunflowers on the balcony floor, a dish of fresh fruit and raisins. Slowly, they began to stay. Within a week, five flitted around, eager to nest. An important thing about sparrows: they’re respectful. They don’t scream or fight. They never dare attack. They are peaceful, full of gratitude. But they are determined. They pursue their goals with twigs, pebbles, and wishes. Balanced birds. They don’t squawk like crows or fight over bread like pigeons or seagulls.
After a few days, a small colony grew. Five became seven. A month later, fourteen. I created a little village, leaving only to bring back provisions.
One night, I dreamed a wind carried them away. They didn’t return. That sadness struck deep. I had to take further action. The sparrows looked at me, waiting. Some perched on my hand when I brought them food. I bought cages. I put my favorites inside. I knew the sex of each. I separated a few for future plans—I’d figure that out later.
At work, I began stealing mannequin heads. Nests of hair for the sparrows.
Months of warmth, care, proper food. The first chicks were born. Five baby sparrows. I made sure they were well-fed. From the other cages, two more groups—five and six. Their chirping filled the air—I wore earplugs.
I taught them commands. A whistle, a movement code. Two fingers: find the gold watch. Three fingers: a distraction maneuver. They entered stores, stole merchandise. My room filled with heads, arms, legs, plastic torsos. Mostly heads.
Sometimes, I woke to see those greasy, reddish-haired girls staring from the corner, one eye half-open.
Over time, my home filled with twigs, insects, seeds, sparrows. I could tell them apart. Little by little, I gave up space to the head-homes, to the branches, until I became just another point in the house—a piece of furniture. A bush.
Slip a stitch by Ishma Fahim | Instagram
Three’s a crowd by Ishma Fahim
You tell me you love me. I tell you I do too (We are both liars) by Ishma Fahim
DOLLSHOUSE by Eve Carcas | Substack
At the tender age of seven, the dollshouse had been as far as her mind could stretch. Everything uncertain would remain outside. As she grew older, and the world around her swam with newness, the dollshouse walls swelled under the weight of her conviction. Behind the sanctuary of the plywood, the world outside appeared disfigured and sallow, ugly and uncompelling.
The dollshouse was clean and floral-smelling. The furnishings were soft, still, unlike the sofa downstairs on which her parents sat at opposite ends, dents cradling them from years of slumping off the day. Oak sideboards glazed brown, ocean blue scatter cushions, a grandfather clock that she swore really ticked if she stayed quiet enough. She refrained from checking the time on her own bedroom wall, instead peering her giant eyes into the living room of the dollshouse, blinking through the window.
When she sat down to eat dinner, Dad would often ask what she’d been doing. She would say she’d been playing with the dollshouse, and Dad would say ‘dollhouse.’ But she would keep saying dollshouse regardless, ‘because it’s a house for dolls’. Many. It sometimes felt like Dad didn’t like the dollshouse, what with the eyes and the quiet tut he thought the girl couldn’t hear. He’d said more than once that the girl was getting too old for that now. But then, when he’d talk to other parents, he’d be full of praise for his daughter’s ‘creative mind.’ ‘She’s very introspective,’ Dad would say, with a smile. The girl looked up introspective when she got home and wasn’t sure what it had to do with her. It wasn’t contemplation that she experienced when she climbed the fourteen stairs (and an extra one on the landing) to her room to marshal the dollshouse’s contents. It was nothingness. She felt in complete harmony with the painted plastic and crudely stuck together pieces of wood. And that harmony hummed inside her like all of the colours mixing together until they turned white.
The arms and legs of the dolls moved, but they didn't bend, so she had to sit them at the kitchen table with their legs sticking straight out. She liked to arrange them so that the smallest of the five (two parents, three children) had both of his hands on the table, and the older brother sat beside him with a hand reaching to his plate. They had to be on the side facing her, so she could keep an eye on them. Mum and Dad sat on opposite ends of the table, and the medium sister sat on the side closest to the girl’s looming figure, with an expanse of table plane before her. The girl doll faced in the same direction as the girl. She didn’t need an eye kept on her.
Increasingly Mum came home stormy, and Dad spoke with pointy edges when he picked her up from school.But if she could keep the dolls neat, with everything in their place, at least they would be balanced. She frequently had the sensation that she and everything around her were about to topple off a very high, very sheer edge. So she made sure the chairs were always tucked in with the cloth’s checks aligned with the table’s edges. She stacked the plates and pushed something straight against their sides to make sure they met perfectly. The curtains were either open and tied to the sides or fully closed, never anything in between. This was, quite possibly, her greatest purpose in this life. Her work was reverent, diligent. It bordered on worship.The fact that such a beauty could exist–preserved, snowglobed–kept the ecosystem equipoised. If something as precious as this could maintain an equilibrium, that must signify something.
Each morning she would wake up to find furniture on its sides, living room lamps in the bathtub, grandfather clock tucked up in bed, books in the sink. The mantlepiece would be bare of its adornments, the sofa cutting a diagonal across the room instead of having its back to the wall. She would spend her school day thinking about it, almost twitching with the energy she would, when home, funnel into straightening out the edges and making it nice again. It was never made clear to her how the mess appeared, but she was certain it required her care. The phenomenon made cosmic sense to her. Where there is imbalance, there must be a force of balance pushing against it. And where there was imbalance, there was the girl.
The boy who sat opposite her in maths looked like someone who had never known balance in his life. She spent many of those lessons looking at him, but only when he wasn’t looking back. He came into school with dirt under his chewed up fingernails, like he climbed out of the ground just to learn about the Tudor era and eat stale ham sandwiches in a gymnasium. His sullen demeanour seemed to be etched deep into his face, which always reminded the girl of what her Dad used to say when she’d pout: ‘if the wind changes, you’ll be stuck like that.’ And the boy’s eyes were set so deep. She’d never seen anything like it. They were cradled by a smear of lilac underneath that never faded, bleeding out intensely from his eyes to his cheekbones. She’d only seen him looking back at her once, and it was a stare so acute that she knew he could see her intentions written across her blush as plainly as if painted. He could see her searching for his equilibrium, ready to force it herself when she couldn’t find any.
He slumped over his sums sheet like the world pooled over his shoulders, compelling him down. She always wanted to bring him home with her, wrap him up safe, lock the door. Feed him a hot meal that would suck the purple back into his eyes, untie the clasps around all of the curtains to draw them so that the boy could bask in the darkest dark and finally get a proper night of sleep.
In him, the girl saw potential. Gazing at him, she knew that the beauty she worked tirelessly to contain within the dollshouse could leak out into the world beyond, and, that if it did, it would shrivel in the bleaching sunlight. This was something she couldn’t allow.
Under the cover of the classroom’s chatter, she leaned across the table and whispered to the boy.
‘Do you want to come for dinner tonight?’
He looked up at her. His eyes were extra sunken today. She felt she had to squint to even see them.
‘A chicken died yesterday. We keep chickens. One of them got killed by a fox. But Mum’s car pulled up and scared it off, so it left the body in the garden.’
He stared back at her blankly, eyes begging to wander back to the front of the class.
‘So we have too much to eat by ourselves’ she explained. ‘You should come.’
The boy blinked.
‘I’ll do your homework while we’re there.’
He blinked again, eyes snapping shut and back open. That must be so tiring for him, she thought. But not as tiring as the nod he gave her. Slow, like his head was heavy, like it sapped every bit of energy out of him to do so. She smiled. This was going to fix everything.
Where there was imbalance, there was the girl.
The walk from school to her house wasn’t long, but it felt like a whole day passed from door to door. She tried feebly to make conversation, to little avail. If he was difficult to get a word out of in class, outside of it was even more of an impossible task. But when they stepped through her front door, he introduced himself to Dad as though conversation came naturally.
‘Thank you so much for having me,’ he said, shaking his hand. ‘I love chicken pie.’
Dad’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he smiled through it, and looked over at the girl.
‘Your Mum’s not going to be home ‘til late, so you can eat now if you want.’
The girl pulled her friend into the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at Dad.
‘Sorry for your loss.’
He looked squarely at the boy.
‘It was just a chicken.’
At the dinner table, where Dad seemed to be pretending they ate every meal, talk flowed with grace. They learned about the boy’s favourite football team, where he wanted to go on holiday, that he was allergic to mustard. He was the perfect guest. Until, after excusing himself to go to the bathroom, he went missing for fifteen minutes. She found him where she had hoped she wouldn’t. In her bedroom, sat before the dollshouse. He looked up at her.
‘This is all yours?’
She nodded.
‘It’s beautiful.’ He said, and reached a stubby-nailed hand in to straighten the bath mat.
‘It’s not always like this,’ she blurted out. ‘I just haven’t had time to neaten things up. Because you’ve been here.’
‘They’re a messy family?’ The boy asked, laughing. She tilted her head to the side, as though considering him.
‘Very.’
He knelt in front of the set not scruffily, but with grace. His presence meant something, and he was entirely aware of that fact. Legs cleanly folded underneath him, both hands raised in front of his eyes to delicately trace the square of the living room rug. The boy ran his fingers along the edge of the fabric, and pushed the corner to straighten it, so it became parallel with the bed. The girl bristled at the sight.
‘I’m glad you like it. I spend a lot of time here,’ She told him, slowly walking in his direction as though to move too quickly would remind him of her presence.
‘I can see why.’
‘Would you like to join me?’
He looked up at her. The girl stood over him, her shadow cast over his eyes so the smudges under them didn’t look so dark. He smiled. Nodded, tentatively.
‘You have to keep it tidy, though. You can play in it with me. But you have to keep it tidy.’
He nodded again. ‘I will. I’m normally not good at keeping things tidy…but this is special.’
The girl lowered herself to sit by his side, letting the light once more uncover the jutting contours of his face.
‘I knew you’d understand.’
‘Did your friend leave?’ Dad would ask her later, looking up from the television. The girl nodded. ‘Bring him round again. He was nice,’ he said, and settled his eyes back on the screen.
The room seemed particularly quiet on these drawing-in evenings. She could hear her own breath as she crouched down in front of the dollshouse, tugging the scarf she’d started using to cover its cross-section to the side. Now, when she visited, there was never any mess. Every cushion placed delicately on the sofa, every frame on the wall straight, the candle on the mantelpiece, the shadow of its flame shivering, the lamp glowing on the bedside table.
In the seat at the dining table that faced away from her, the boy sat. He craned his tiny head on his tiny neck to turn and see her. She smiled down at him, imagining his view of her giant’s snarl unfolding.
‘Hello.’ She whispered.
‘You haven’t come to see me in ages,’ The boy implored.
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s dark in here,’ he whined. The girl pressed her lips together. Since it had become perpetually neat, the dollshouse’s glow had faded. She no longer felt drawn to it, finding herself wrapped up in anything other than its upholstered plywood. There was no reason to rush home to its toppled furnishings or skewed adornments. It meant less and less to her with each passing day.
The first time she’d gone days without checking on him, the guilt had been too overwhelming. His tiny face gazing out at her, voice unable to reach her side of the room.
The boy’s lower lip trembled. He rose from his seat and stalked around the table, until he faced her from the other side. He reached up to the table cloth, and yanked the whole thing off. Plates and cutlery clattered, cups skidding across the floor.
The girl took a deep breath in, held it for a pause, and sighed it out. This again. She stretched her hand into the kitchen, and began delicately, carefully, returning each item to its proper place.
The Flame at the Back of My Throat: Footnotes to a Poem by Zane Perdue | Substack | Other Work
Es war ein Traum (for Heine)*
It was like a dream1
I had fallen in love
With a furnished room
She was coolly clothed
In pink moonlight2
Those curving nightbeams
And the suicidal moth3
Of my little heart
Fluttered to her bluish flame4,5
The bedroom lights were off. Outside, a porch light and the moon shined the same yellowish white. This livened the latent blue lurking in the blackness of trees, the distant houses near the woods, the street itself. A pair of cats walked through a garden bed below.
(This scene in the muted white frame of the window made me remember walking up to a childhood friend’s house, built on a slight hill, at night, when everything wavered, submerged in evening tones. The wide single-paned window of his living room was like a confused searchlight. Shadows, like big trapped moths, fluttered behind the glass—and if his sister saw my gray, indeterminate form coming up the road, she would pause, silhouetted in the glass, and wave before fluttering off again.)
I picked up a piece of paper from the window sill. It was a little poem I had written on the train, in broken German. I had done it practically half-asleep, thinking of other things as the words fell rudely onto the paper on my knee.
A phrase stolen right out of Heine. . . Everything after bordered on nonsense, had no feeling for the spoken sounds of German, ignored the rules of grammar, the conventions syntax, cultural associations (of which I was as good as ignorant) and so on. But a few words stood out from my little mess. There was
Mondlicht,
not of the boney, gauzy, jaundiced kind, smiling with stained teeth down on reality, but the pink kind that comes down shining once every few decades, centuries, eons, under which perfect sonnetine architecture is composed, under which prophetic dreams of fallen empires are had.
I scratched out the moonlight, deepening the paper.
Next was a moth (not unlike those appearing in the light of the memory above), a suicidal moth,
eine selbstmörderische Motte,
isolated entirely from the lepidopteric world of metamorphosis, pollination, and silk production, unattracted to all light not reproduced in the reflective surface of another self-murdering moth, a moth with black wings and white eyes, covered in bioluminescent dust, a moth caged in the ossuary of a woman’s ribs.
There was a flame,
eine bläuliche Flamme,
blue like a purgatorial pilot light, hovering at the back of my throat—the breath of a single kiss, and I would choke on this drop of heat. I scratched the blue flame out too. The pink blush of the moon faded, but rather than returning to its ignominious shade of eggshell, it glowed a warm saron—a pale orange, a golden button fallen from a velvet coat, still trailing black threads of silk. (This was not written down anywhere.)
Outside, slow and lupine headlights swiveled on the street below, expressionistically breaking up the little scene, frightening away the shadows of the cats. I paused, breath held, and my heart syncopated with V’s breathing (she was lying on the bed, next to me), which did not rise up and down but pushed and pulled like waves, in and out, lapping, automatic and lacustrine. I carefully lay down, and the breathing pulled me out into the open waters of sleep, the shores and skylines and words of the day fading into blue and black nothing.
*“Es war ein Traum (for Heine),” first published in its original, unfootnoted form by Ghost City Press in Rossignol: Eight Poems (2024), by Zane Perdue.
Thank you for reading paloma, a monthly art and literature magazine. For information on submitting your work, please see the Submission Guide. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram, and you can catch up on past issues here.
Subscribe today to receive the next issue directly to your inbox ↓