012. SACROSANCTIMONIOUS.

blasphemous bacchanals.

Welcome to ISSUE 012: SACROSANCTIMONIOUS 🕊️

My mom’s told me when the sky opens and light pours down through cotton-ball clouds that that is her mother, my grandmother. Mom thinks Grandma (or I might’ve called her Mémère) is Godlike ambrosia dripping down from the sky. It moved me how definitionally awesome she imagined her mom to be, and that she still looked for her out in the world despite all the time, history and life keeping them separate. My mother lost her mother when she was little. This made it so that she was motherless at the age when mothers are crucial to a girl-becoming-woman. She was likewise without a stable referent when she became a mother and so adlibbed her role more than others do, I think, despite motherhood already being more or less improvisational. It must be difficult to be a daughter without a mother, to be a mother without a mother. Adrienne Rich:

“For most of us a woman provided the continuity and stability—but also the rejections and refusals—of our early lives, and it is with a woman’s hands, eyes, body, voice, that we associate our primal sensations, our earliest social experience.”

What waywardness then follows the premature cleavage from the mother’s body and guidance? What reverence you must hold for the sacrificed. She recounted mournfully that she was teased for the hair on her upper lip and resented that no one was around to tweeze her pubescent moustache, nor even to tell her to do it herself. In turn, she made sure that I was soft, hairless and womanly. Grooming is polysemic and both definitions apply. The discipline of my body translated to active mothering. It must have consumed her in ways I can’t understand, a spear piercing her side, when I stopped shaving, made a spectacle of my unruliness. I, to her, willingly and disobediently made myself look motherless by renouncing, denying thrice and more, the care she had longed for. Relief and affirmation were palpable when I took back up the razor. It’s me, the prodigal child with smooth and sweaty underarms. Submitting to a small gesture of love is relatively easy, and yet widely and consistently honouring my (thy) mother seems impossible. 

Her mom told her, and my mom told me, that if ever I forget myself and a man makes me horny, I was to reach for the Rosary and say ten Hail Mary’s. The pretense is that God would take time out of His busy agenda to diffuse my libido and preserve my chastity but, really, who can stay wet, fumbling and fiddling with the beads, for ten Hail Mary’s and not feel too stupid and desperate to have sex. This is part of our game of ancestral telephone: my mom resurrects her mom (usually by way of an anecdote laced with French Catholic guilt), passing down morals and baggage, and then she relies on me to remember them both and push everything along forward in language and action. This is my cross to bear as a daughter: I carry accreted time and stories (and shame) in and with my body. 

All moms are omnipresent. It tracks that her mom is, to her, something intangible and external like a glow down from heaven or between the dust motes tangoing in magnified window light; her mom is in the ether and has to be; her mom is an essence she looks to preserve. But when I capture my mom in her physical absence, she’s coming out of my mouth in a bubbly loud laugh. I roll my eyes like her. She’s the angle of the bridge of my nose, the syntax of my spoken sentence, my quick irritation, my sensitivity. Wine transubstantiates me into her. My mom permeates internally, her mom occupies the vacant space out there, and between the two of them, within the trinity of us, there’s only a thin mortal cutlet of me, here to announce the good news. Claudia Dey wrote, in this article in The Paris Review, that children “take up all the available space;” I think she’s right to feel that way as a mother. But children too are densely packed, full up with their forebears and their forebear’s forebears, surrounded by them, genuflecting for them. She said that when you make a child, you make a death. You do—and, past deaths are visited upon the newly promised deaths. Sheila Heti’s concluding lines in Motherhood are: “then I named this wrestling place Motherhood, for here is where I saw God face-to-face and yet my life was spared.”  Mothers are on some celestial level synonymous with and antonymic to God. When I thought “holy,” I begrudgingly and immediately wrote my mother’s name. Doubtless her pen would swoop and scratch until it marked down her own mother’s, remembering the godliness of her body with the curve of a pen stroke. Sometimes I wax sympathetic toward my mom, because of her mom, and I wish that I could’ve mothered her tenderly; I liked to dream of having been my mom’s mom and raising her for me. Then again, sometimes I remember that I am the daughter. I celebrate this, the sacrosanctimonious relationship.

Writing this introduction, I’m chuckling at the fact that we advertised, for the first time, for submissions adhering to a specific theme. People, we said “party.” What we got was a strong and cosmic through-line of spirituality and morality. So much religious iconography. We asked for “festival,” and our submissions replied with meditations on the transcendental feeling of careful love; with solidarity at a funeral; with an outright feud against God. We got abstract art that nevertheless drips in divinity. We solicited “bacchanal” and we received “blasphemers.” When we began

paloma magazine

—and even now as we constantly revisit what this magazine is and can be—we wanted, like the title of our first issue proclaimed, to be sweet and sour; to be tasty and also toothsome. It’s so pleasurable, then, that a request for celebration yields these quasi-antithetical ruminations on the very meaning of mortal life in lieu of any straightforward representation of joy and pride. Absolute intimacy, total vulnerability; what a riot! Reader, you are anything but superficial. God, I’d love to party with you; I bet we’d talk about Freud and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire; we’d probably work each other up with existential dread. Alexandra McKay wars with God, bringing us through a meditation on creativity, loneliness, grief, femininity, and (plant) motherhood: “creation felt like the only way to have a life.” Poetry by Namah articulates a deep shame and vulnerability couched in total atonement and comfort. She triangulates devotion, abjection, and reflection. “Cry! Your Husband is Dead” by Vasundhara Singh thinks of collective mourning and reimagines tradition, figuring a unified body of women made possible by death and subsequent “forced melancholy.” Vibrant and captivating artwork by Michael Moreth is complemented by a visceral and emotional piece by Katie Vasquez. Thank you for being here, it’s truly a miracle we’ve come this far. 

abby | co-editor

Cry! Your Husband is Dead! by Vasundhara Singh [Fiction]

Blessing and Compassion by Michael Moreth [Visual Art]

Town Crier by Namah [Poetry]

Lifting by Katie Vasquez [Visual Art]

Fighting With God by Alexandra McKay [Fiction]

Cry! Your Husband is Dead! by Vasundhara Singh

The professional mourners sit on a charpoy around a big copper thali adorned with besan ladoos. The brown balls are made by the oldest mourner, Chandini. Their fleshy legs stick out from under their ankle-length skirts as they apply Rhododendron oil. The younger mourners wear sly smiles on their faces for this act feels forbidden. Outside their mud cottage, the bangle maker sits on his haunches and allows the middle-aged mourner to pull his leg. 

“We will not pay more than a hundred Rupees,” the woman says. 

“A hundred Rupees for all these bangles! You are all devils.” 

The woman, her eyes hidden under a chunni, shows him her tongue and he pretends to catch it between his index finger and thumb. White bangles are the most significant prop for the prayer meet because the mourners have to beat their chests with such ferocity that the bangles break and fall at their feet. Then, as is custom, the newly widowed woman walks on them to signify to all those present that she has forfeited the material world and has assumed a nameless, faceless existence, devoid of color or laughter. The mourners receive a payment of fifty Rupees each but during the flu season, they may increase their fee to seventy Rupees each. “Aren’t we late?” asks Dharti, the mourner with an extra thumb. 

“The prayer starts at half past seven,” replies Ujjwala and shouts to the bangle maker to ask for the time. 

He shouts back. “The Bulbuls aren't out yet. You still have ten minutes left.” He leaves and the middle-aged mourner returns to the hut carrying white bangles in a straw basket. She hands four bangles to each of the six women. A group of mourners must consist of only seven mourners for, according to the Sacred texts, a man and a woman, once bound in matrimony, remain together for seven lives. The mourners must also be widows because they are pure and detached from the material world. The women belonging to the professional mourner's group of Shahdol once had husbands who worked as laborers in the city of Bhopal but they perished in the gas tragedy of 1984. A year after their deaths, tired of the monotonous routine of a widow, Chandini decided to start the group. Unlike traditional widows who are forbidden from stepping out of their homes, these women found a way to reclaim their freedom.

A bottle of bitter Desi alcohol is passed around and the women sip generously. The routine of beating, banging and howling requires both physical strength and mental elasticity. Chandini ties the neck of the bottle with the loose string hanging down from her waist and hides the bottle in the bilious folds of her skirt. Everyone at these prayer meets are in such an intense state of forced melancholy that they will fail to notice God if he walks in through the front door. They journey barefoot along the unpaved pathway between the wheat fields to the house of the dead tailor. From a mile away, they can hear the howling of women. Before entering the house, the mourners take a deep breath and produce a sound from the pit of their stomach, a sound quite similar to the cry of a bitch in labor. They drop down to the floor and surround the dead man who is covered up to his shoulders in a white sheet. His widow and the women comforting her are all dressed in white sarees. 

Ujjwala screams, “Oh! You poor woman! This saintly man will no longer protect you! His eyes will no longer watch you.” 

Dharti crawls to the widow and holds her by the chin. “You will no longer cook or sing or paint your eyes with kohl.” 

The women beat their chests, thump-thump-thwack! Their white bangles drop to the ground in pieces. Just as the women are elbowing the widow to stand up and walk on the bangles, a loud sound silences the room. Chandini feels wetness at her toes and looks down to find that the glass bottle has crashed against the tiles. The mourners watch with wide eyes as a stream of alcohol flows to the ear of the dead tailor. The widow and the women are no longer howling. They stare at the broken bits of bangles floating in alcohol. Laughter like the sound of an engine revving up emerges from the crowd of white. It is the aunt of the dead tailor. “Bastards!” she guffaws, “give yourself a break.” She stands up and walks into the dark hallway to the right. The mourners continue to stand like statues. A minute later, she returns with two bottles of Desi alcohol. “I keep it for special occasions,” she explains to the unblinking crowd, and hands a bottle to the widow and takes a sip out of the other. She invites the mourners to sit on the dari with them. The bottles are passed around and each woman sips, hesitantly or otherwise. The dead tailor lies a foot away with his eyes shut and cotton stuffed in his ears and nostrils. 

“I have roasted peanuts,” the aunt announces and heads to the kitchen.

Blessing and Compassion by Michael Moreth

Left: "Blessing" (Watercolor) / Right: "Compassion" (Watercolor)

Town Crier by Namah | Substack | Instagram | Letterboxd

to my love, im sorry i threw up in the uber. 

gather around to witness 
one most spectacular transfiguration!
watch this empty chalice 
sublimate 3 spirits
into something beautiful. 

see how 
all is bathed in light— 
my hip, your navel,
the waning crevice that forms where they meet. 
what is this, if not a miracle?

benevolently I
dole out eager affection 
to every half-cusped hand that brushes by;  
a toll felt most dearly on the morrow 
(but god, not yet). 

and you! 
brushing away from my face 
first hair…then the regurgitated drink
you had rebuked,  
betwixt the gushes of your own effusive sweat. 

in bed, no longer invincible,
I wonder if 
last night’s aether is enough 
to embalm me in your arms
for I can think of no lovelier atonement. 

Lifting by Katie Vasquez | Instagram | Substack 

Watercolor, gouache, and ink on mylar

Fighting With God by Alexandra McKay | Instagram | Substack 

“I’m fighting with God. Yesterday, after my ceramics class, I ran into a pole while texting my mom back about her eye surgery and the planter I made dropped right out from under my arm and shattered in the street.”

The young woman looked to the pavement outside and winced, pained by the memory of her recent loss. 

“I can never go back there now, without that planter.”

The class was run by a local craftsperson who held annual multi-part lessons in ceramic-making with only eight available slots. Getting in took upwards of five years. She’d been waiting half a decade for this. It began with a unifying of the people to their clay—earth material, real substance. The second installment was a prayer made over the puddy-like mud. They laid flowers between their balls of earth and the kiln—giant, flowy shapes of figure eights between “the matter and the method” their instructor called it. 

“It shouldn’t even be degraded by the title ‘class.’ This was a spiritual journey we were on together. This meant something.” She muttered the last bit under her breath, her voice twinged with self-hatred and regret, as she looked down to her lap to pick at her fingernails.

The class finished with a two-day retreat outside the city, where there was countryside (more earth meant greater opportunity for connection) culminating in a ceremony where they washed the planters, chose a crystal to anchor the center of the bottom of the pot and planted their plant babies. It was the Mothering Ceremony that would don them all the status of ‘plant parent’ thereafter.

“Like I said, it really meant something, you know? Did I mention I basically spent half my life on the waitlist?” Looking out the window, she bit at her nail, shaking her head. 

She’d signed up for the class in her late twenties after seeing countless ads and stories about it online. During her initial registration, she’d been going through a tumultuous time—her family dog had died, her longest relationship (18 months) had ended over a rather revealing argument over a lost bag of Cheetos. Now, nearing her mid-30s, she was ready to take some control over her life and what she wanted from it. Gone were the days when women needed to have a set schedule for themselves. She didn’t have to rush through the first decade of adulthood just to make sure she could have children. She didn’t want children. She wanted plant children, and this was the best way for her to achieve that goal.

“Damn that Drew Barrymore, you know? Making us all think that we can be free women and mothers at the same time. If only she didn’t have real human children, she’d be my plant parent inspo.” She brooded over Drew Barrymore a little more than she liked these days, after Drew’s renaissance and all. “It’s like: how are you the only person in the world who can pull off a flower crown and it just works, you know?”

She scanned the outside world of the city street, observing all the people passing by. Despite herself, she looked only at the women, trying to find some semblance of herself in them. She liked seeing the disheveled ones most. They couldn’t be too perfect or, well, she just naturally hated them. And she didn’t want to fill her heart with hatred. Disheveled women made her feel more centered and calm.

“So, like I said, I’m fighting with God. I just wish they would do what I wanted every once in a while. They made me a woman, and women can do anything. Doesn’t that count for something?”

She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nose, something she’d learned in her weekly movement class, and also from her therapist, who believed that breathing was not only the key to living, but to “a life well-lived.” And while she was supposed to measure her breaths with a cadence of counts—so as to accomplish the most optimal physical calm, according to science—the young woman was often impatient with the process. Why did her breathing also have to be under such scrutiny? With that thought, she released a huff from the side of her mouth, letting the air become trapped and leak from her lips, flubbering under the pressure the air made to escape. Her shoulders sank down at a sharp angle. 

“Everything just feels so heavy all the time, so disproportionate,” she lamented, thinking once again of her shattered pot and, of course, Drew Barrymore.

The class poster she saw online all those times had a number of testimonials on it from previous students. Proud new parents, she supposed, rolling her eyes at the thought in her head. Each of the attendants were public enough that their social profiles were easy to find in a single search. Lydia, who was quoted calling the class “transformative” and “unlike anything she’d ever experienced” seemed to have quit her 9-5 job shortly after and had since opened up a hybrid coffee shop and stretch studio. She also sold vintage denim from a secret basement window out the back. Andre had gone on to become a Master Ceramicist, whose debut collection of plant pots were available online (launching at 8 p.m. EST, password: clayday). Another, Samson, said the experience “changed his life for the better” and that it was “refreshing to finally create something meaningful with my hands.” His primary job or “passion” was churning natural peanut butter. By hand.

“Fucking Samson,” she sneered. “Nuts are fucking meaningful!”

When she prayed to God, the theme of her prayers came back to Sheila Heti’s eternal question How Should a Person Be? Lately, it was punctuated by a particular problem: that she, in fact, was the one person she knew who was very particularly not allowed in on God’s plan, and that she was, actually—literally—the only human being on earth whose attempts to partake in a meaningful existence was perpetually unsatisfactory. 

“Why do all these other people get to be everything they want to be? Why don’t I get to be anything?” she said aloud. “Them with their fucking multiple income streams, their offline dating.” The young woman raised her arms to the side and let them plop down audibly beside her. “Did you know that people are out there making something from nothing, and I can’t even hold on to a goddamn planter and keep it alive. Real things are happening out there! Just the other day, I saw someone reinvent the fucking cheeseboard. There were cheeses on there I didn’t even know existed. Did you know about Timberdoodle cheese? Bonaparte? These people are not even cheesemongers. They just do it for fun.”

The problem was, she was never actually very creative, but creation felt like the only way to have a life. That’s what other people got, wasn’t it? A real life worth living? And wasn’t God the root of all creation? So, clearly, God had something to do with her misery.

“It’s like I’ve been left out from some master narrative where everyone’s building the life they want for themselves. And what do I get? Not cheese! Not nuts! Not even a fucking plant pot.”

She shook her head vigorously and gritted her teeth, directing her chin toward the sky. She let all the tension in her body resound through her jaw and neck, down to her shaking elbows and hands. She balled her fists. Her face was strained, a look of begging across her eyebrows. From the street, anyone could have seen through the window eyes that yearned for relief. For peace.

Exhausted, she eased the stress in her body and let her hands fall to a cradle in her lap, her head slumped. Chin to chest, like she’d learned in yoga.

“I don’t want to fight with God, though,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t have the energy to fight anymore.”

She looked out the window. A line of sun cast itself on her lap for a moment between the tall buildings in the distance, and continued flashing between the skyline soldiers. Shadow, light, shadow, light—a pattern she wouldn’t have been able to see if it weren’t for the fact that she was in that car, perpetually in motion, parallel to the sun and its blaze. She looked on in quiet awe.

“Did you see that? The sun, it’s so bright, brighter than I’ve ever seen. Is that a sign, do you think? Was that God?”

The car came to a stop under the partial shade of a bridge. Small rays of sunlight spread themselves across the ground like a halo. 

The taxi driver turned and glanced over his shoulder, craning his neck to look to her. “Oh,” he said. His eyes moved down to her hands folded in her lap. He seemed to be searching for the right words to say. “Was that me you were talking to that whole time?”

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 ↓