swallowedsound

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Richard Siken // cover story // 2023

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Source: In The Life; A Black Gay Anthology - edited by Joseph Beam

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poetry is not // posted on substack june 16

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???

Asking every question. Litany in which I ask God every question. There are a finite amount of questions. Eventually one question is another. Can you edit poetry? If it spills from me unfettered why chain it? How can you better [blanket emotion]? -I used the brackets so as not to confuse the word blanket as a verb. There are so many meanings. How am I to know which is correct? Is there correct? Yes. The original intention is correct. Wrong is not bad; it is simply wrong. There is no bad. Is there no bad? [Desperately.] The universe cares nothing for bad. Morality does not exist. therefore it is the only thing worth bothering yourself over. Yes, you can edit poetry. It spills from me unfettered but my hand is caged. If I could only write so fast. [!] This was about questions. Everything is questions forever, infinitely. There are no answers; therefore no, nothing is correct. Correct is not. To contradict is correct.

“Multiplicity of meaning, ‘enclosedness,’ are the rule rather than the exception. We are meant to hear both solid and sullied, both toil and coil in the famous Shakespearean cruces.” From George Steiner, On Difficulty.

Too much? I could not hear him when he wrote. I tried to make clear my voice. Thank God he did not have spellcheck. Thank God none of them did. The immortal art of error-making lost - multiplicity as a plural? If I could only write so fast!!

“It’s just that whatever I capture in me has, when it’s now being transposed into writing, the despair that words take up more instants than the flash of a glance. More than the instant, I want its flow.” From Clarice Lispector, Água Viva. Trans. Stefan Tobler. I have a question to ask him. It’ll have to wait.

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Clarice Lispector ― The Hour of the Star

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yellow pears

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At Aguilar Grocery and Deli. The glass door entrance plastered with signage and stickers, mostly cigarette brands and NO SMOKING and PUSH and WE ACCEPT EBT, posed towards the ninety-degree angle of the street-corner, where the blacktop slopes towards the drain. Note the little patch on the corner of the drain, with the smiling cartoon fish notifying the onlooker that the drain runs to the river to the sea. Two concrete steps lead up to the glass door into Aguilar Grocery and Deli, underneath the red awning with the name in bold white, smeared with streaks of the city, as the city does. Underneath: GROCERY • DELI • ICE CREAM • CIGARETTE & CIGAR • ATM & EBT • BREAKFAST • SODA • CANDY. Wrought-iron railings on either side of the steps. The sky is blue today. The clouds reflect off of the windows. The window facing the northbound street is packed with boxes: smiling produce and branded water bottles and Coke and Pepsi. Competing retailers. The window facing the westbound street is pasted over with brightly-colored sandwich options.

Inside Aguilar Grocery and Deli. The bell over the door is sleigh bells, from a box in the attic of Mrs. Hernandez, who teaches general music at Franklin Elementary School and divorced her husband three years ago and lives just down the block in the little townhouse with all the potted plants outside it and the uncontrollable ivy up and down her storm drain. Inside the house of Mrs. Hernandez is a hoard of Stuff and Things that she can’t bear to get rid of if she doesn’t know where it’s going, which is why she gave the Aguilars her sleigh bells, because now when she goes into the store she knows her sleigh bells are being put to good use. Slay bells, says Tomás, who quirks his hand just so whenever he says it and grins at Naysha, who gets it, Tomás, we get it.

Sorry. Inside Aguilar Grocery and Deli. Boom box behind the counter, first of all, with an extendable antenna for the radio station. From Shawn Stewart’s college yard sale, Everything Must Go! from like, a decade ago. Mr. Aguilar doesn’t like to have parental guidance warnings in his store so it’s tuned quietly to family friendly 96.3 WFXO, slowly teaching Naysha all the top Latin pop hits. She sits on a stool behind the cash register and lets the fan turn awkwardly toward her every few seconds and blow her hair away from her face. In front of her the plastic screen is stacked and glued with a tower of different candies on one side and a cigarette mosaic on the other, and then for sale, they’re layered deep behind her. Concrete floor under her – the stool grates against it horribly.

The counter is to the left of the door, the ATM nudged triangular into the corner between them. On the right the freezer, all bags of ice and red-clad polar bears. More things that whir. White noise. Then the ice cream cooler, and then the soda cooler. The store deepens along the westbound street. Naysha’s right arm, the one with the brace on it, faces north, and she looks to the west, deep towards the kitchen at the back. The counter extends like an L along the southside wall, and then the gate drops a step down into the store. That’s where the fridges start: milk, eggs, cheese, dairy, ice cream pints, then frozen veggies and fruit, and frozen pizzas and pizza rolls. The center of the store: a rack of cans, cereal, granola bars, the bakery. The Fakery! Tomás says brilliantly. It’s all micro-plastic laden breads and donuts and cookies. But Naysha does have a soft spot, weirdly, for Smoreos. S’mores oreos. She used to keep a pack behind the counter to share with Tomás on the rare days they worked together. It was always a dangerous combination. They weren’t very productive.

Sorry. Inside Aguilar Grocery and Deli. Beside the dry items and the Fakery rack, the produce counter. Mr. Aguilar gets the shipment every morning and loads it fresh. Gala and Fuji and Granny Smith apples, and Bartlett pears, and peaches that go fast. They don’t keep berries but they do have bananas and avocados and corn on the cob and tomatoes and lots of pepper varieties. Naysha doesn’t feel too bad stealing a pear every Friday to wash and eat behind the counter, soft grain of the texture on her tongue and the skin breaking under her teeth. She doesn’t get out of the city very much. She imagines that the fan is the breeze between the orchard trees, that the light coming through the door is filtered through the leaves, that the ache in her shoulders from practice only last week – was that only last week? – is from climbing trees, that the confining brace is just a basket, full of pears and apples and peaches, that the smell from the kitchen in the back is just the farmhouse, like Papa’s in there cooking eggs and hash browns and chilaquiles, just drifting over to her out the window from the back porch.

Kitchen in the back: Jose-Luis works back there on the morning shift Tuesdays-Fridays, and Stefanie works in the evenings on Thursday-Sundays, and Naysha rarely sees Carolina, who very quietly does Saturday-Monday mornings and doesn’t say much of anything to anyone but her scrambled eggs are the fluffiest out of all four of them, including Mr. Aguilar.

The farm is the pipe dream. Tomás grew up there before his mother moved them all to the city to live with Mr. Aguilar, Tomás’s uncle, to take care of their mother in her shriveled golden years as her brain rotted in the confines of her little old skull. Naysha grew up in the city and rarely traveled outside, and when she did it was on the train to competitions, watching the trees blur by and gripping her duffel bag in the other. In the little green suburbs outside of the city when she was young she smelled the grass and the trees and the flowers and watched the bees outside the gyms she had the meets at.

She only ever won gold once, when she was in tenth grade. That was the honeymoon period with Tomás as her brand new shiny best friend, just after he came out, when the ancient matriarch Aguilar was coasting, before her brain really began to shut down. She had good teachers that year, and Eddie and her were beginning to figure out how to coach and how to be coached, respectively, and her grades were high. That was the year she won gold in February, the year that Tomás and both of her parents and Naomi all came to the meet out in Allentown and she landed solid after the uneven bars and heard her family explode in the stands.

In Pittsburgh she didn’t place in the top ten, but she’d at least made it to States. “You have next year,” Tomás said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “You’re only gonna get better.”

Maybe she had. It was difficult to tell. These days in Division I gymnastics she barely scrapes by. She likes to think that she’s getting better every day, that the competition is just stiff, that she’s cleared the path before her of detritus, that she can see each brick in the road, the white mortar, the cut it clears through the haze around it.

She fumbles with the brace on her arm. As if the farm was the only pipe dream. The wind in the trees and the basket on the ground and the grass under her bare legs, maybe a dress and the skin on her shoulders dark with sun. And not the city-sun either, the one that glanced off the asphalt like a bullet and boiled through her skin and lungs like a burn, but the country-sun, the one that Tomás always described so lovingly, the one that embraced the clouds like dear friends, the one that grew the corn and the apples and the rows of zinnias and the daisies and the yellow roses.

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