the maidenby Christine Kwon
the life blood in me dries up
in my spot on the mantle
but I guess she puts me here
because the quality of sun
is correct—she does not think
of the air vents above,
in this way she is like a bull
my arms are so thin they shake
she likes me best
of all the houseplants
because my shaking seems
most alive
she comes to inspect
the baby green shoots
but there are times I think
she wants me to die
when the decided day to water
passes she looks at me
tuesday wednesday thursday friday
surprised I am still waving
my fried yellow leaves;
some days entering another room
she enters june
goes through
the door to paris
Christine Kwon writes poetry and plays with cats in New Orleans.
@theschooloflonging (instagram)
Jim’s Dead Wife by Samantha Caroll
“It’s not about being strong enough. I’m getting through it because I have no choice.”
Kylee turns to her dog who is making noise in the background in a way that shows her bald head. I scroll the comments, disinterested in the video now. Everyone is sending her love. I’ve been watching Kylee for six months. She posts every Wednesday and Friday, but sometimes she is too weak from chemo.
----
My boyfriend cooks me dinner and he points out, again, that for as long as we’ve been together, I’ve never cooked him a meal. And I don’t do the dishes either. I tell him I hate cooking, plus I’m depressed. He says I have no reason to be depressed because nothing bad has ever happened to me. It’s funny that he tells me this, because as far as I know, nothing bad has ever happened to him either. We are three months out of undergrad and he has a career as an investment banker. He has four siblings and they have a family group chat. He goes to the dentist. Regardless, he goes on to tell me that something bad happens to everyone. I should cook him dinner before mine happens.
At this point, I have to get out of the city. I tell my boyfriend that I’m joining my family in the Hamptons for a week. It’s not a lie, I really am. My parents routinely go to their vacation home and ask me to join. On the Long Island Rail Road, I look at Kylee’s Tik Tok. She dances and applies make up while a strangely cheery robotic voice vibrates through my headphones. “When. You! Have. Terminal cancer!” I hide my vaping from the conductor.
----
My mother looks more wrinkly every time I see her. If I told her she would instantly die. I consider it, though, since she can afford botox and it’s a shame. Before I say anything, she tells me there’s another person staying with us. Jim is writing a book that dad is publishing. I’m not surprised, since dad often has favorite writers he cycles through and discards. But Jim is special, my mother says, because his wife just died in a freak accident. Okay. She doesn’t know any details. We just have to be nice to him.
I am surprised when Jim brings up his deceased wife over dinner. My mother is on her third glass of wine, and is disturbed by the subject, I think. She had just been ranting about how she is boycotting Bloomingdales. They wouldn’t let her return a jacket, though it was unworn. Bloomingdales made her out to feel like some sort of criminal.
Jim talks about being there for his wife in her last moments, despite the fact that she was unable to hear or see him. I think he’s had a lot to drink, too. My dad tries to subvert the conversation by calling Jim an “awfully strong man,” which is present in his writing. Jim says, no, he isn’t strong.
“You have no choice,” I say. It's the first time I've spoken.
“Yes, exactly,” Jim says.
I know it’s bad but in my room I can’t stop thinking about Jim, who is downstairs, and who probably believes I am much more attuned to suffering than my parents. I hear shuffling as if they are saying goodnight. Our Hamptons home is old, the way my mother likes them. I can hear the steps creaking, and if I open my door slightly I can see who is coming up. I decide to wait for Jim, and when I see the top of his head, I close my door and take my top off. He should be passing my room any second. It happens very fast and almost robotically. I knock my lamp off my dresser and scream “OW!” though I’m untouched. I sit on the ground as if some clumsy incident had occurred.
He asks if I’m OK through the door. I don’t respond. I’m thinking maybe I should’ve made myself bleed. He cracks open the door just enough to see the lamp on the ground, and for his eyes to meet my tits. He then shuts the door and apologizes profusely.
----
Two full days go by before Jim fucks me. It was in the guest room and our clothes were on. Jim really wants his book published so it was very quick. But I had to ask him if I was the first person. He didn’t know what I meant. I clarified: am I the first person you’ve slept with since your wife died tragically? (Not those exact words). In response, he covered up my mouth. But I think I am the first.
----
I am the only one at the beach because it’s 1 pm on a weekday. I have a book that Jim told me to read but I don’t actually read, so instead I’m checking Kylee’s accounts. She’s gone quiet. I’m bothered by my boyfriend's texts so I leave them unopened. There are certain things he will never understand. This morning when Jim and I had sex, I felt a transferring happening. As if he was using me as a vessel for his despair; his emotions were shared with me. When he left the laundry room I sobbed, overcome with a feeling of loss like I had never felt before. It is possible we are experiencing similar grief.
I lay my head down on the towel and try to shut my eyes, but the sun is too bright for me to remain comfortable without sunglasses. Suddenly I feel as though I am not alone in the stretch of sand. I stick my neck above the patch of sunlight that obstructs my vision, and can see a person lying on their stomach about fifty yards out. They are not actually stationary but seem to be crawling towards me. I quickly stand up, but then I am just standing there. I can clearly see it now: a woman’s body with a bloody stump where her head should be. Like a cockroach she is inching closer; fingers sprawled out, gripping sand in chunks, gaining speed.
-----
I knock louder on Jim’s door in case he hasn’t heard me the first time. It’s 11 pm. Jim opens the door hastily and asks me if I am here to return his book. He is asking in case my dad is still awake and listening. We leave tomorrow.
I let myself in. I don’t care if the floor creaks because there are more pressing matters at hand, like life or death. I ask Jim how his wife died. My mother only told me it was a freak accident. Did anything especially horrific happen? Had she, maybe, been decapitated?
Up until this point, the only man I have ever seen get angry, for real, is my dad. My boyfriend never gets angry, only inquisitive, which is pretty annoying.
Now I see Jim get angry. He calls me a sick-minded little freak with a silver fucking spoon in my mouth whose greatest wish is to struggle and that he’s sorry he ever let me trick him into having a sexual relationship. Which, by the way, is purely sexual because he doesn’t have one ounce of respect for me. He knows I don’t understand literature and that I’m exactly what’s wrong with today’s youth. In fact he cannot wait to never see me again. Can I get the fuck out of his room now. And continue on with my sad little life.
I want to tell Jim what I saw at the beach today, but I know I can’t. I fight the urge to tell him that whatever’s wrong with me is something he gave me. Something like pure evil.
Instead, I shakily make my way back to my bedroom. I step over my broken lamp which I never picked up off the floor. I get into bed and pull the covers around me, compulsively opening Instagram and checking for Kylee. Nothing yet.
Me Being Meby Howie Good
There’s bad shit going on. An unexploded rocket sticking out of a field. Wildfires capable of creating their own weather. Supply chain problems. Often one has to make things into oneself in order to have or see them. Just ask meth cooks what that means. Meanwhile, the ground is wet with rain, and yet a book is lying there dry. I pick it up. It’s called Closer to the Light, about the near-death experiences of children. The universe instantly seems smaller, almost claustrophobic. I would construct a bigger universe if I could and insist that there be an “e” in lightning.
Howie Good's latest poetry book is The Horse Were Beautiful (2022), available from Grey Book Press. Redhawk Publications is publishing his collection, Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems, later this year.
Brennan by Grace Jones (2019)
Weird angel, psychosoma by Gabriel Friend
Almost immediately after it was decided to keep me locked inside my home, different parts of my body began to swell up abnormally. My left breast was first. I noticed it the morning after sleeping my first night in captivity.
Two days later, now swollen enough that I couldn’t avoid seeing it in a mirror from across the room, now sure it wasn’t temporary—I sat in the bottom of the shower, pushing my spine into the wall and squeezing my knuckles.
After the first week, they covered all my windows with big sheets of adhesive privacy film, blurring everything outside. I only witnessed the end of this process, the shadows of workers squeegeeing out the air pockets, then ascending away like ghosts on the building’s window-washing platform. When it’s bright outside, I have an opaque gradient from sky to ground, and otherwise, a gray glow without detail.
The right side of my face, from the inner corner of my right eye and across my cheekbone, had by this time become swollen as well, heavy enough that I could feel it, the new mass, when I turned my head. Then the underside of my right forearm, near my wrist, which made it increasingly difficult to eat at a table, then the middle of the left side of my back, mirroring my left breast. I adopted new positions to comfortably sit down.
I wrote a novel, like I had always wanted to. I copied most of it from other books I had on hand. With nothing else to do, I took all the pages into the shower and sat with them until they came apart. I shower to divide the time, morning and evening. Each day, the water runs over my body in novel directions.
Gabriel Friend’s recent work can be found on Instagram at @phriendgabriel.
Reformer by Emmeline Clein
The room with the machines was lit magenta. The instructor wore black spandex separates, we all did. It wasn’t a rule, but we all just knew. Maybe it was hive mind, or we all had the same strain of female hysteria, or the same eating disorder, if there’s a difference. The machines were grayscale, white metal base, black straps and a black sliding platform, silver pegs for the straps and silver metal springs. Originally, the guy who invented it called it The Apparatus, but I guess that sounded too much like a torture device, so he went with The Reformer when he brought it to America, where we were prepared to apply the protestant ethic to exercise, where girlhood is reform school for the body. That guy died decades ago, and then the girlbosses grabbed his gravestone, exhumed his machine and rebranded. Pilates was reborn, but the experience remains religious, and like all religions causes collateral damage: more corpses, the cruelty of any cult, the pining for perfection that brings devotees to their knees.
In the pink room, she spoke softly but with certainty, directing our miniscule movements. We were sweaty, done with class, in the cool-down section. Lying on our backs, we tilted our pelvic bones up and down, pretending to get in touch with our breathing. I usually spent these minutes thinking through the myriad ways I might have died during class. A rollover taken at the wrong angle setting off a snap of the neck. Sweaty feet slipping off the bar during the final plank series, falling face first into the coils, metal wire slicing my throat. Staring at the white cinderblock ceiling lit the color of a Barbie’s favorite bikini, overheated and hopeless, it was hard to tell whether these were nightmares or daydreams, my fantasies or my worst fears.
In retrospect, that was probably part of the business plan, which was pretty flawless. The girl in charge figured it out about a decade ago, when she opened her first studio, sandwiched between a juice bar and a clothing store that sold silk separates, clothes that clung in all the wrong ways unless you had the type of body this girl promised to get you, if you would stop whining and writhe around on her machines multiple times a week. She accumulated acolytes quickly. She renamed all the moves the man had invented to be done on the machine, giving them cute yet confusing codenames so girls felt like they were in on a secret, and like they were doing something fun, flailing around on the sliding platform and squat jumping, sweating until they couldn’t see straight.
She hadn’t thought about all that sweat leaving the platform slippery. The first time it happened, she got lucky, she was teaching a private lesson. When the girl fell the sound almost made her sick, the crack and then the thud and then the gasp and then the silence. But it was the way her skin changed color that did it in the end, the way it paled and then purpled in the fuschia light. She should have seen it coming, but she was shocked when the dead girl did a sit up and hopped back on the machine, shrugging. She wouldn’t have spent so much time at Pilates in the first place if she’d had anything to live for. So that became the business plan, the machine’s coils were spring-loaded and the coffers filled up fast, ghosts are great gig workers. It turned out that the girls were most likely to die during a too-quick transition from catfish to wheelbarrow, so she started slipping that series into the end of every other private session. When it happened to me, I––well, I won’t tell you how I felt about it, what’s more boring than an anecdote about exercise class?
Emmeline Clein writes about girl problems (pop culture and mental illness). She’s currently working on a cultural history of disordered eating for Knopf.
