020. EASE INTO A BEING.
in your company, i have become.
Welcome to ISSUE 020: EASE INTO A BEING 🪽
What we owe to ourselves and one another, as persons, friends, lovers, family, can sometimes be unclear. I think often of the question “to whom am I beholden?”, alternating between feeling as though I must be with and for many people and should spread goodness indiscriminately, or tempering the urge to be responsible for everyone and everything all the time. In that vein, I wonder about vulnerability, about failure, about harm. How much of myself to another am I willing to give, how much of another for myself must I take? Judith Butler contends that “to say that any of us are vulnerable beings is to mark our radical dependency not only on others, but on a sustaining and sustainable world,” even and especially since this “interdependency includes the threat of death” as “there is no way to dissociate dependency from aggression once and for all.” There is no world in which I am radically there for you and in which I do not risk injuring or being injured by you. But if we do not enter into this relation together, we lose the ability to work and rework the world we share. In other words, how we show up for one another varies, but that we must, for the sake of creation and change, is invariable.
In the short fiction “The Cat Lady,” details the colourfully creative paranoiac opting-out of a lonely unfulfilled life. Still, to reinvent herself, over and again, she relies on persons and cats and texts to not only witness but inform her process. Momina Raza’s “Ode to Medea” balances the all-too-humanness of harm against the Sisyphean task of humanity. Two pieces approach renewal and rebirth from vastly different vantages: ’s poem “Wings” thaws into new spring but not without a nostalgic look back at past love. Then, Laura Postlová’s short story, “The Gargoyle in the Window,” which broke my heart, anthropomorphises loneliness, eerily and vividly describing a protagonist who allies herself with her pain and suffering when no other connection is possible.
The final collection of poems, by myself and my dear dear friend Pragati Sharma, came about because I attended a Queer and Trans Poetics writing workshop through the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at University of Toronto with Jaya Jocobo, Danez Smith, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, and Cameron Awkward-Rich. The poets and scholars leading the workshop—a very necessary and heartwarming event in a time of profound anti-trans, anti-queer, and frankly anti-art rhetoric bombarding us from every direction but namely from the South—invited us first to think about what queer and trans poetics are and can be: thematically, structurally, stylistically. They provided two writing prompts: what do you have right now (read as: what does community look like, how are you feeling, what are you holding on to or holding out hope for) and what are your gifts (read as: what do you have to give back and to whom). You’ll notice then that there’s significant overlap between the first and second prompts, probably because queer and anti-homophobic people, who rely on one another daily for more life, are wont to characterize what they have as always something because of or worth sharing. There is no poesis that is not collaborative. So it follows that after the workshop I sent my odes to everyone I had in mind while writing them, everyone to whom I owe a sense of poetics, and Pragati sent back texts which rival and trump my own with their tenderness and longing. She generously agreed to continue sharing this work outward with me, here.
In this issue, we teeter on the edge of (inter)dependency, the volatility of living in relation, the best intentions that bring out the worst of us and the worst scenarios in which we were our very bests.
| editor-in-chief
*Please note, the email version of this issue included the incorrect titles for Modesty and Laura’s work - this has now been corrected.
The Cat Lady by Modesty Sanchez [Fiction]
Ode to Medea by Momina Raza [Poetry]
The Gargoyle in the Window by Laura Postlová [Fiction]
What we have, between us by Pragati Sharma and Abby Lacelle [Poetry]
The Cat Lady by Modesty Sanchez | Substack
The woman whistles, piercing the still, warm air of the nascent autumn afternoon, stirring the parkgoers from the siesta they had slumbered into. Without fully disturbing them, however, she whistles again and stray cats wiggle their way out of numerous hedges and run to follow at her heels. Every wakeful person seems to have paused in their lethargy to take in the spectacular sight. The woman continues whistling, cats continue to emerge and scurry into her ranks. She exercises a control over them that, adjusted for scale, would rival that of a persuasive dictator; they are the shadow of the long black shadow cast by her tall slender body.
She wears a long trench coat with geometric shapes embroidered on its sleeves; underneath, a white T-shirt, a black velvet tie, and flared sequined pants whose multiple colors change shades when glinted by the sun’s light. Atop her head is a straw hat made of woven palm fronds that she got on a trip to a beach in Faro some years back. Black boots crunch lightly on the gravel path.
In at least two of her coat’s many jumbo pockets (six total), she carries novels about something or other. The woman is well-read, you see, but she reads out of a fervent desperation, rather than passion. She’ll read any book, and, once finished, she won’t ever discard it; by amassing a nearly insurmountable weight of volumes, each of which she believes shines light on her motivations, inspirations, and dreams, she mitigates her risk of being discovered and her identity made known.
Maybe the woman is overly paranoid. After all, she had already been missing for thirty years, nearly all of which had been passed on another continent, tucked into a small Mediterranean village where she boasts the strongest command of English. Logically, she knows no one will find her now, because all efforts in that direction have been permanently paused. But there’d been a time, (twenty-seven years ago, she’ll note out of a stubborn diligence) when she’d been cocky and had to relearn the incumbent importance of hiding herself. It was during this time, when she was living in Boston, secure in an obscure anonymity, that she’d had to reevaluate that attitude.
It was three years into her disappearance by then, marked by relief and only the faintest echoes of a once thundering paranoia, and she had been walking down Newbury Street. That day, the woman had more energy than usual, invigorated by the women with long flowy hair and loose skirts chatting excitedly as they walked arm-in-arm down the street; the new Miles Davis album could be heard drifting out of a tiny record store nearby, floating above the heads of a group of college kids drunkenly laughing and hollering as they left a bar and walked past in their bellbottoms. A buzz of excitement and idealistic optimism electrified the summer air, sustained by news of the recent moon landing.
But just as soon as this spark of joviality ignited her sense of good will, it vanished. The woman had sat down on a nearby bench to further immerse herself in the palpable excitement by reading The Boston Globe’s coverage when she found herself stunned by a small blurb on the cover of the front page: a development in a case that, though cold, had drawn significant national attention. The case was one the woman had been following closely, because it was that of the woman’s disappearance.
Back in the small country town in Ohio where she had resided only three years prior, a local radio host had gone to the public library and by chance taken off the shelf a book whose inside jacket contained a circulation card with the woman’s name on it. It was a mystery novel about a detective who is driven to insanity while attempting to solve the abduction and murders of a pure-hearted housewife and her three daughters. The radio host couldn’t believe his stroke of luck and, spurred by investigative rigor, requested the woman’s entire file to see the catalog of books she had checked out in the year leading to her disappearance.
That year the man she shared a house and marriage with was constantly away and the woman was filling her time with various solitary activities (such as reading) to distract from the prickly hurt of her existential disappointment. It was no surprise then that the library records showed she had devoured nearly one hundred books, almost all of which contained some kind of violent or elaborate plot; in one, a thin and beautiful model finds herself pregnant. Desperate to maintain her status as the muse of an influential photographer, she attempts an at-home abortion that ultimately goes haywire. When the photographer returns later that night, he finds the woman freshly dead, splayed on her back, with blood stained on her inner thighs and streaked along the wooden floor. He can’t resist, he rearranges the girl’s hands, shines a light on her forever pained face, ponders the sight, takes a photo. When he finally calls the police, the crime scene is now a staged set, useless to the official investigation, but evocative in the photographer’s resulting photos.
Not coincidentally, when the police had arrived at the crime scene staged by the woman the day of her disappearance, the photos they released prompted journalists around the country to marvel at the perfection and general neatness of the event. The woman, propelled by an unexpected surge of creativity, had crafted an elaborate scene with elegantly dropped lamps, artful displays of distress, and tastefully minimal blood painted onto a knife and smeared on the floor. No one could believe it was a real crime scene and, at first, the woman thought she had overblown it such that soon everyone would see through her charade. However, staged or not, the crime scene offered no clue to her whereabouts and the general consensus came to be that she’d been abducted and brutalized by a precise but psychotic criminal; she’d been the perfect image of a loving mother, a dutiful wife, an accommodating person, a helpless victim. No alternative seemed conceivable.
She had taken pains to dissolve herself of that image, adopting a daily wardrobe of brightly patterned knee-length dresses and regularly applying heavy makeup to her eyes, but now, reading an optimistic quote from one of the investigators on her case, the woman feared her jinx would be up. She worried that, having glimpsed into the stories that had been her only intellectual refuge, the only place she would have been able to develop or evolve her ideas, to glimpse into potential lives beyond her own and paths to obtain them, the investigators would be able to track the movements she’d formulated in the heat of mimetic desire, in her anxiety to be a character in a compelling story. They would arrive at this busy street corner to take her back and ask her irrelevant questions—or worse, they would choose to do so at the Boston Public Library, ready to track her down and crush the serenity she’d long cultivated in her little corner of Bates Hall, all to further compound the humiliation of being found.
Livid and sick at what she felt was an inevitable outcome, the woman returned to the little room she rented in a female boarding house near Kenmore Square. And in that hot and stuffy room she stayed, sweating, constantly in a state of panic that any voices she heard in the hall, any footsteps or loud bangs, meant that they had come for her, ready to deliver her back to her former life. But no one came.
A few weeks later she emerged again and with trepidatious steps she made her way along the Charles River toward Beacon Hill. There were noticeably few people out, and those that were on the street hastened into their monied homes, casting suspicious glances at strangers and adamantly shutting the curtains in their windows. The woman looked at a newspaper; there was no mention of her case, but Sharon Tate and friends had been murdered in Los Angeles. Her eyes flitted through the story, which contrasted Tate’s wealth and beauty with the bloody brutality of her death, emphasizing the tragedy of such a vibrant and rich life meeting an equally undignified and violent end.
The woman empathized with the people shutting themselves into their old money houses. They had lived so comfortably and now, just like her, knew what it was to live in a paralyzing anxiety that the next knock on the door, the next loud noise, the next inquiring stranger was in actuality a force of irrevocable upheaval or even of supposed retribution.
There also was a short report of a local conspiracy theorist who had first gained notoriety for his skepticism of the Apollo 8 journey and was now generating attention for his disbelief about the Apollo 11 mission. The woman couldn’t help but laugh. Like a gasp, she was made aware of the sticky New England humidity, its persistent clamminess, and knew it was time to leave.
After traveling Europe for a bit, she eventually settled in a remote village on the southern coast of Spain, where the raspy sounds of unfamiliar accents and the bewildered though ultimately uncurious gazes of the residents granted her the blissful isolation she’d always craved. Nevertheless, the woman kept tabs on her case, which had come to a delicious, long-lasting halt shortly after that most recent development. Regardless, the case continued to weigh heavy on national consciousness, having taken on a life of its own, reproducing itself in urban legends, conspiracy theories, and heated debates.
The woman was satisfied with the intrigue garnered by the story she had concocted, and she felt gratified by the alluring position she occupied in the minds of so many. But life had to go on; no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t languish forever in the glow of her accomplishment. After having built up a reputation of mystery and compelling lure, she now wanted to see how simple it could be to command love and adoration.
The woman was familiar with the town’s stray cats, who sunbathed in the middle of the street, forcing cars to drive around them; she was humored when a cat passed her on the sidewalk without even sparing her a glance, as if it, an official member of the village’s society, had places to be. Her general knowledge of cats, however, was limited only to that classic refrain of having to earn their respect and trust. To achieve this, she started taking long walks up and down the town’s paseos; she went during the quiet, still hours of siesta to ensure the cats heard her melodic whistling as she inspected the little gardens surrounded by thick bushes or threw bits of kibble and tuna fish onto patches of grass.
Initially, roused from their afternoon naps, the cats spared only quick looks full of a languid curiosity toward the woman who had started bringing them food. But it wasn’t long before they became utterly devoted to her. They all lined up behind her, uttering earnest mewling sounds to catch her attention, emitting motorized purrs when her nails scratched their ears, and jumping high into the air to catch the treats she’d throw.
The residents didn’t know what to do with her at first. But as the years turned into decades, they became more enamored with how the cats, consumed by an increasingly frenzied desire, responded to her almost despotic care and attention. The woman still couldn’t adequately communicate with the residents, but that made it easier for her role in the village to be solidified; she brought a foreign charm to the tranquil streets that entertained the retirees and enchanted the young children. People saw her and waved, smiled; the lady at the fruit shop always threw extra oranges into her bag; the men at the local bar sent beer to the lone table she occupied. She’d lost her anonymity, but her person remained tangled and interpretative to those around her.
She still boasted a fascinating allure, but it had more to do with her charismatic aura and intentional care instead of the dark intrigue that dominated her her mysterious and tragic past. In essence, the cat lady and the disappeared woman were two separate entities, two different characters from novels with nothing to do with one another. She was able to step back and take a clear, categorical review perspective of her storied life. She pondered the exposition, climaxes, and denouements of the characters she’d concocted, reveling in each one’s personal dramas, stories, and evolutions, none of which would have been possible without decisive fissures of identity.
Years later, but not too long ago in fact, the woman had been in Budapest for the holidays. She spent her trip bundled in an oversized black coat, exploring the Christmas market at St. Stephen’s Basilica and walking through City Park. If the sun deigned to break through the cloudy sky, it did so only to reflect the metallic glimmer of the large pearl earrings stretching down her earlobes, or the tangled mass of pearl necklaces applying heavy pressure on her chest, or the long strands of pearls adorning the length of her arms.
There came a night when, despite heavy snowfall, the woman decided (with the assistance of four bottles of wine and maybe a little absinthe) to take a walk along the Danube River, on whose banks she elegantly danced, allowing the streetlights to glimmer off the hoard of jewelry adorning her long body. Then she was twirling, moving so fast she looked to be nothing more than an unstoppable swirl of yellow and silver light, a confusing mass both soft and sharp until, without warning, she collapsed and the night was dark..
Her frozen jeweled corpse was found the next morning impressed in a pile of snow. Her eyes were closed as if in a peaceful slumber and a gloved hand was locked in a gentle caress of her cheek. For years the city’s habitants talked about the woman made of ice delivered to the Danube just days after Christmas, whose serenely expressionless face had been so cold that when snowflakes landed on it, they didn’t melt. Instead, hoards of the city’s stray cats, for some inexplicable reason, arrived to lick them off.
Ode to Medea by Momina Raza | Instagram
Medea remains unheard, even after centuries. Ruthless, fiery, inhumane, retorted a fellow. Misunderstood, humane and passionate, I whispered and continued scribbling notes. Medea wept, but none heard her lament. I reached home, my mother cried, her chicken roast burnt. An exhibition of mummified, brittle and tar blacks scorns, whispering incantations of fear, regret and repulsion. The skin once lined in golden, a vessel of a grotesque parody, deafening my mother with suffering. A feast with a void served on a silver platter. I tried to comfort her but she pushed me away; an embrace left yearning. Her eyes that once gleamed with warmth, reflected her rage. Her nails clawed the marble floor, scraping at fate, I no longer saw my mother. My father told me to let her be. So I walked away but took one last look at her. I realized that the monstrous feminine is a lament for what could have been if things went her way. Medea, my mother— both enwreathed by the flames they both dared to wield.
Wings by Grace Young | Substack | Instagram | Instagram
The Gargoyle in the Window by Laura Postlová | Substack | Instagram
The world had been at my feet and I wanted it all. My body had been a house of love, of energy and life; running miles in the afternoon and then partying until the mauve haze of dawn. I was the leader of a large team at work where money was abundant and my future laid out before me like a bejewelled rug beckoning me forward towards health, happiness: fulfillment. My friends swarmed around me and together we built a world without the word Lonely.
But the sun must set on all our futile bodies, and so it did on mine at the break of winter, when a cough turned into a doctor’s note that turned into weeks in bed. With the abruptness of careless lightning, my warm world became cold. Friends stopped checking in when they realised I had no more smiling energy to offer, and my name on the payroll at work had turned to invisible ink: a useless, erring body in a room no one could see.
Standing became a task unsurmountable; walking too – only crawling to the bathroom when I really could no longer hold my body in. It’s not only my wretched room that I’m trapped in, but the heavy bed itself, pulling me deeper and deeper towards the centre of the earth that doesn’t want me. I had learnt about gravity at school but never felt its pressure in this way – a pull that could not be resisted, an ache that could not be ignored.
Here I am now in the depths of dark December; swimming in a sordid bed: trapped: alone: deluded: dreaming of some kind of renewal.
So in my brief hour of vague lucidity, I invite a gargoyle in through my window. He waits outside for a moment, unsure about the dark and damp of the bedroom, and then creaks the window open slightly – disturbing the gentle spiderwebs. He shuffles through the small gap and looks cautiously at me, as I lie heavy in the sweaty bed, legs numb and weighty and attached to my blankets by force. I close my eyes as if I can’t see him – as if I invite him, willingly, to do whatever he can. This seems to be a good enough invitation for him to perform his duties as he sees fit, unseen by me or the passers-by who hurry down the pavement with other things on their minds. There is no rain and no wind, and any other sounds are muted by the thick stone walls.
So when he reaches, in anguish, and tears a picture frame off the wall, smashing it down against the corner of the bed – there is sound enough. A huge, roaring anger rouses from his gross mouth; screams upwards towards the low ceiling and then down towards the floor. It doesn’t take much to topple the bowing shelves: all the books fly across the room like heavy and tired albatrosses, falling and falling to the carpet – but not before they lick each other’s pages, ripping and tearing as they go. In an instant, all the velvet shimmering party clothes abandoned on the floor are torn to dust with his ravenous claws – incinerated. He doesn’t touch my teddy bear, moving on instead to the dirty armchair, unpicking each thread slowly and yet with so much vivacity that he has the power to undo everything that has been done. Each thread disintegrates and the cushioned innards spill over the edge; vomiting from the chair and crying to the carpet as they go.
I can’t see any of this happen, from the inside of my eyelids, but something is changing in my brain – some synapsis snaps, my flesh takes up a new shape. But it isn’t finished; the gargoyle reaches out and clutches my bedside lamp. It’s a fancy one – it’s made of concrete – but that’s no match for his powerful hands that bend and smash the concrete against the wall until it is just dust falling through the air to the carpet. The bulb is next and the shards pierce into my pillow, missing my red face as they embed themselves into the ruddy green sheets. I plead to the gargoyle: make it all disappear, all my pain and my loss and my prison, make it fall to the carpet in pieces.
He turns to me; I feel his presence shift – and what could be called his face turns and looks at my body. Now he reaches into my knee and starts hammering away at the joint and the bone and the cartilage, pulling it apart and ruining its substance. The muscle tears away and falls to the side of the bed, breaking me apart at my seam. He dives into my stomach, removing all its sickness and discarding it onto the floor, a cesspit of rubble and stinking debris.
There can be no pain with no body; there can be no headache if the brain is launched from its case and scattered across the room; there can be no prison without bars. This gargoyle is a heavenly body and I am his begging servant, stretched across my bed, asking for a renaissance.
What we have, between us by Pragati Sharma and Abby Lacelle
(Abby) Salty, salty tears—full of electrolytes. Everything that my body produces; you can enjoy it. I do. Soaking, wet, liquid fuel. We drip in it; we make abundant. Midmeal, masticating, you tell me your hunger And I take it and share my haves. Cherries, mangoes, watermelon. The capacity to defy and multiply spacetimes— We are together elsewhere and elsewhen. They can’t get here. We drew maps they can’t interpret. I watch an orchid bloom; more time, more space, more life is invented— it’s all the salt, it’s all the moonlight. (Pragati) a strange intimacy with maps flat detail, staccato memory. stalling the hands of time is a long cord, a little sensitive to light, touched and tender. first the I that is also the me and then the singing. infrasound geography, apparitional. my sparse hungers, restless hands rehearse the calm reaching for tender spoonfuls, generous bites tart apple, soft orange spice that clings to the walls, coats your face in your company, I have become unbuttoned and unbothered, more capable of stomaching it all, learnt to stay on a page just long enough to ease into a being. last fall, you (and I) (and our many others) dream of death in one night demolished walls, shaky ground. why is that when they asked us to evacuate home, we could only dig our heels in? (Abby) My gift to you is yellowed-out armpits in all my shirts from anxiety sweats. Care is pouring out. We wring it and water the plants. I train with the weight of your bodies—you’ll know I can carry you, and I’ll know that I can bear us. I bake new recipes that taste like your joys, and I portion them out so everyone stays fed. We don’t apologize anymore, for crying or laughing or needing. All is already known, is already felt. I reorder my self. I is not centre, we is. What I do for me is for you, and you do it for me. We do incessantly, and so are, despite. We scavenge our time and space. I am never not thinking about how we stay afloat, hand in hand, with our bellies to the sun. (Pragati) My gift to you is tending to ashy hands, whispers of how to weather an aeolian attrition, calcified remain. Our skin, a thin membrane, tensile and bruised. I’ll polish our bones come spring. For the time being, I have supplies enough for both of us to remain in this cool shade, fugitives from the light. No sudden genesis, but quiet germination. I will have become Mrs. Dalloway, no, Clarissa, out to buy flowers. There will be no death at this party, only the surprise of recognition. Marking our arrivals, the possibility of address. There she was. There you are. Here we saw. We feel incessantly, and so become, because. Stay still a while and look around. Here, there is muscular thought, dense bone. The world shifts, shapes itself around us. I am never not thinking about how you and I stay rooted, eye to eye, with and against the strong winds in our hair.
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