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Second Wind

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Posted on August 30, 2011 in

The white of the ocean’s foam-froth is said
to contain all colors, while the sea’s green-blue depths
are composed of the colors our ancestors could
not bear. Or could not bear to let go:
the story varies with the source.
And the shadow that lies on the sea is cast

by no flying or orbiting thing, but by
the ocean floor where it blocks the light
from the sun at the heart of the earth. These things,
however they might terrify, are nonetheless
true. I will hold you through the shivers
and terrors. I will kiss the unholy curve
of your neck. I will try to take your mind

off the shadow. It is the shape of a tree.
There is the brusque sound of the branches as they
caress the wind. Its black silhouette
against the calamitous sunset. The darkness
that lives at its core. What the leaves know
and do not tell the roots. And what the roots know.

 

Troy Jollimore‘s first book of poems, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. He is an associate professor at California State University, Chico. His most recent book of poems is At Lake Scugog (Princeton University Press). “Second Wind” is one of his two poems published in ZYZZYVA‘s Fall issue.

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Lust for Life

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Posted on August 30, 2011 in

We live on East 12th Street, across from a Catholic school where little boys play kickball in suits and ties. Eli says they’re straight out of a Truffaut movie; the way they look like little men, the way the teachers drag them from the playground when they get into fights. Eli knows everything about foreign movies. If he really likes one, he calls it a motherfucker. The other night we saw a total motherfucker about a couple who give themselves a big going away party but then the money falls through for their trip to Africa, so they hide out in their apartment embarrassed to tell their friends that they never left. We’re kind of like them. I mean, we’re not exactly hiding out, but our apartment is our little sanctuary, where we can pretend to be the only people in New York. A tiny, lit window amid fifty others in a giant brick building. With our cat, Myshkin, silhouetted behind the iron security bars.

Eli and I are sitting at that window right now, looking down at pigeons fighting over a pizza box. We’re playing our favorite game: What Would You Miss Most If You Were Dead?

“I’d miss the sound of the radiator clanging,” I say.

“But how about when it first comes on, in October, and you think about the long, grey winter with your face stiff and freezing and your ears feeling like they’re going to snap off,” says Eli.

“I like the winter because you don’t see those huge cockroaches in the street anymore.”

Eli rubs my arms up and down with his hands. “I like when they disappear because I know they scare you and I don’t like to see you scared.”

“It freaks me out to think of them swarming somewhere underground. Or stuck together in a giant frozen clump just waiting till it’s time to come out again.”

As I talk, Eli takes my hand, extending my arm like a skinny, white twig. He kisses the bruises. He got mad at me last night for scratching our new Iggy Pop album and pushed me. Not really hard, just a little shove. I mean, I sort of fell back against the wall, but I was wearing stilettos. Now Lust For Life skips and crackles, repeating the words “torture film” over and over, until one of us moves the needle. And no matter how cheap they sell records at Crazy Eddie’s, buying a new one means less money for the phone bill. Which we don’t plan on paying anyway.

“I’m sorry Jane-face,” he whispers. He always calls me that, and I don’t know why I like it so much.

“I’d miss you being sorry.”

He murmurs something like, “I’d miss you missing me being sorry,” and carries me to the mattress, which covers most of the floor of our one and only room.

 

It’s grey outside and I’ve overslept. Eli has already left for his job at the used bookstore. He always comes home mad because no one there likes him. He’s been trying to organize the employees into an “anarchist union.”  He posts notices for meetings in the stockroom, to which no one shows up. Instead, they laugh behind his back and call him “Irate Eli.” I know this, because my friend Ellen was there on Eli’s day off and heard them talking. They were saying that only a retard wouldn’t know that “anarchist union” is an oxymoron. They don’t understand that Eli has something a little fucking deeper in mind. It has something to do with “dismantling the power pyramid.” Maybe Eli tends to go on and on about it. And no, it’s not my favorite side of him, but basically he’s nice to me. Except for when he isn’t.  Even then, it’s not like he’s completely mean.  So he slaps me in the arm, big fucking deal. And anyway, I’m no doormat. I hit him back. It’s called passion. He always apologizes for starting it and acts really sweet for at least a couple of weeks. Plus, he’s an amazing cook. Add to this the fact that he’s five years older than me (I’m 20), with blond, curly hair that dips over one of his liquidy blue eyes, writes perfect imitations of Frank O’Hara poems, and always wants to be with me. That’s the real draw. He’s my first serious boyfriend and he loves the righteous shit out of me. And he isn’t one of these losers who’s afraid to say so. In short, he’s a motherfucker.

 

I’m late for my acting class at the Lee Strasberg Institute. I put on whatever clothes are lying closest to the bed. Eli and I are the same, skinny size, and so it doesn’t matter who wears what. He’ll say, “Buy us a pair of pants today,” or “Look, I got us a Lydia Lunch T-shirt.” I pull on our black pants and wrinkled bowling shirt covered in cat hair. I run my fingers through my hair, stiff with gel and hair dye. Eli is proud of my bright red hair and tells everyone He Loves Lucy.  A black swath of eye-liner and I’m out the door, in the street, the freezing air blowing tears sideways out of my eyes.

I run up the stairs of the steam-heated school, peeling off my coat, scarf and gloves as I go. Students are draped over chairs; their heads hanging backwards, arms limp at their sides. The teacher walks around testing everyone’s relaxation level, picking up arms and letting them drop. An arm that stays suspended in space: BAD. Complete floppiness: GOOD. She gives me the raised eyebrow (I have been late many times before) as I slump backward, letting everything hang. Eventually I feel a hand around my wrist, and my arm being raised. Her grip tightens. Christ, here we go. She’s looking at the bruises. I want to go, “OK, show’s over,” when she finally drops my arm, which is now so tense it feels like a crowbar. Here at Strasberg, they say relaxation opens the emotional floodgates. It’s the first step in learning how to cry. Real actors can cry the way I can only do at the movies, or in the bathroom with the door locked. That’s why I’m here, to learn the fine art of weeping. That’s what makes you great. That’s what gets you a job.

But I also have other plans. I’m not like the girls in my class, running around with their doctored-up headshots, trying to look like Jaclyn Smith. I’m going for something darker, more real. Just yesterday I caught sight of my reflection in a window, and I thought, “Shit, yes!”  There I was, walking by a building covered in peeling Richard Hell and the Voidoids posters, and everything about me, my hair, my clothes, looked art directed. Like I had sprouted up from the street like an indigenous element of the urban terrain. But I’m not totally alone. The one person in the whole school who gets me is Ellen. I knew it the moment I saw her black, chopped off Louise Brooks haircut. She and I talk for hours about the work we plan to do. We’re in the thinking stages of a movie that will be truly revolutionary because it has no plot. Imagine, a movie where nothing happens. Only the sound of footsteps on glass. Wow. I just thought that part up.

The lights go on.

“See you Friday,” the teacher says.

We all sit up, groggy. I put on my father’s overcoat from the ‘50s and my black beret. Ellen comes up.

“Walk me to the train.”

“OK.”

We hit the street and it feels a little warmer, because now it’s snowing which takes the edge off. The sky is pearly pink and things are quiet; the Ukrainians sprinkle salt on the sidewalks in front of their tablecloth/samovar/Easter egg shops.

“So, how’s Irate Eli, the master of all things evil and sundry?”

“Fuck you. He’s being very sweet. I mean, very, very sweet.”

“Let’s go have a beer.”

“I can’t. Retour D’Afrique is playing at the Quad.”

“Haven’t you seen that like fifty times?”

“Yeah, so what? It’s Eli’s favorite movie.”

“Oh, well. In that case, forget it. I mean, I’m just so sorry. What would Eli do if he couldn’t watch Retourdefuckingafrique on a continual loop for the rest of his life? What time does it start?”

“Eight.”

“It’s six-thirty. I dare you to come in and have one fucking beer.”

We’re standing outside the St Mark’s Bar in a clutch of skinny German kids and various punks and New Wavers.

“OK, but you’re buying.”

Ellen pulls me in to the bar. I see people I know: a directing student who once filmed me walking down Wall Street in a bathrobe at 4 a.m. Two French girls who slept on my floor for a week. And tons of regular customers from the restaurant where I work.

“Hey, waitress, where’s my soy burger?” says one of them.

“I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” I yell over the noise as Ellen orders the beers.

Before I know it I’m looking at two empty Heineken bottles. The directing student is making fun of me for studying method acting instead of experimental theater. I’m screaming over the jukebox, saying he’s full of shit, what about real motherfuckers like Brando? He buys me a shot of Don Julio. I bet him the next round that I can cry on cue. Everyone at the table is suddenly interested; they watch me as I stare off into space, conjuring up a dog that I once saw get hit by a car. The room begins to blur, when I notice the clock on the wall. It’s 8:30.

I throw a crumpled up five on the table and stand up.

“Shit. I have to go.”

Everyone’s yelling something, but at this point I’m banging into people on my way to the door. Then I’m huffing out little clouds of frosty air, running the four blocks home, slipping in the snow as I go. I get to our building and walk up to the fifth floor. Eli isn’t home. Myshkin rubs against my legs and follows me as I throw off my coat and flop down onto the mattress. The room is undulating in a nauseating way and I lie there, focusing on a tiny dot on the wall. The cat purrs, the radiator bangs, and I pass out.

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Love Story, with Cocaine

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Posted on August 29, 2011

Maarit’s father had given her a dog because he hoped it would provide her with something to do. It was true that Maarit did not have much to do, though she always felt busy, which was, perhaps, a natural consequence of waking up daily at 3:00 P.M. Most of her activities involved spending her father’s money. That her father’s solution to this would mean Maarit necessarily spending more of his money (on dog food, on dog toys, on dog hospitals and dog vacations) was typical of him. Equally typical was Maarit’s decision not to say so. She was his youngest, most glamorous, and most difficult daughter, and she knew that a large part of her father’s toleration of her lifestyle depended on her maintaining its hair’s-width acceptability.

The dog, a greyhound Maarit instantly named Mimu, came to her fully grown, or nearly so. He moved with snakelike grace, his coat was a rich thunderhead gray, and his eyes were little expressive bogs of brown. There was, however, no way around the fact that there was something plainly wrong with Mimu. He shivered constantly, for one thing, and was a reflexive biter of such determination that Maarit removed Mimu’s muzzle only when serving him supper. Soon Mimu’s most spectacular behavioral quirk emerged: attacking strangers.

His first victim was an old Russian woman, whose mauling occurred within Toompark only a week after Maarit first laid her hand upon the hard, skully part of Mimu’s brow. The old Russian woman, in Maarit’s mind, sort of asked for it by dint of attempting to pet Mimu as she passed by. One might think that a leashed, muzzled dog would be incapable of inflicting much damage. But Mimu’s previous custodian had not thought to trim his nails in some time–if, indeed, ever. By the time Mimu had the old woman on the ground (Maarit pulling back on the leash with every one of her 105 pounds), he was raking her chest and arms with a catlike avidity. It was a cloudy weekday evening; the park was virtually empty. Taking note of this, Maarit helped up the speechless and pretty badly bleeding old woman and without another word allowed Mimu to drag her back to her apartment in the Old Town. For several days she stayed away from Toompark.

The second attack was trickier, emotionally speaking, in that it involved a child who was walking with his mother along Toompark’s edge. Again it was early evening, the champagne-colored sun dissolving behind some trees. Mimu just bolted at the sight of the boy. The leash in Maarit’s hand went from a dense fabric cool to searingly hot in the space of half a second. Maarit let go, endured the endless seconds in which Mimu approached his target, and watched with fascinated horror as Mimu launched himself at the boy like a gorgeously living torpedo. Mimu was muzzled and Maarit got him under control quickly enough; crystal-eyed shock seemed to be worst of the boy’s injuries. When Maarit tried to slip away, the boy’s hysterical mother followed her. When Maarit began to run, so did the mother. Maarit surrendered to her fate, and–nodding, apologizing–gave the boy’s mother a fake cell phone number and fake address.

Unbeknownst to Maarit, the woman knew who she was: Maarit’s father, a businessman whose business he chose to describe publicly only as “business,” was often in the tabloids. The next day the woman showed up at her apartment–another gift from her father–with two frowning policemen. (The woman had been provided with Maarit’s address by a dry cleaner they both shared, a breach of trust so severe that Maarit seriously considered taking legal action.) When Maarit was asked by the policemen if Mimu had had anything to do with an attack on a Russian woman a few days before, she hesitated a moment too long. They seemed to know her eventual, emotionally riveting denial was a lie, and there was some vague talk of putting Mimu down. Her father, who had key allies among the city’s constabulary, took care of the matter, and even gave Maarit money for a dogwalker. Maarit hated this taciturn flunky, and after a few weeks paid the dogwalker twice what her father was paying him (three times what her father was paying him, actually, given that it was all his money) to stay away from her. From there she went back to walking Mimu on her own.

The next person Mimu attacked was also in Toompark, this time in the middle of the afternoon. The only reason it happened was because Maarit allowed herself to be distracted by the wolf whistle of three Russian men evidently enjoying a midday vodka blowout. (Maarit, who was not Russian, would have sooner slept with Mimu than a Russian.) When Maarit, whose post-independence command of Russian had faded to a few lush profanities, turned to tell the men to go fuck their mothers with a broken broomstick, Mimu bolted. His victim this time, thank God, was a man. By the time Maarit had Mimu under control (a very relative concept with Mimu, true), the man was, somehow, laughing as he got to his feet.

He was an American, around thirty years old, and had long and shinily unclean brown hair: the haircut of someone who did not worry about haircuts. His face, though, was clean-shaven and kind, if not particularly remarkable. He was wearing a black V-neck sweater (which had spared his arms the brunt of Mimu’s claws) and jeans whose knees where, thanks to Mimu, whorled with Milky Way-shaped grass stains. Maarit, who lived for a time in Cambridge before flunking out, had always been fascinated by the masculinity gap between the English words “guy” and “man.” Before her was a guy. To her frequent emotional sorrow, Maarit was most often attracted to guys. She was not attracted to this guy. She did, however, like the fact that he was daring enough to pet Mimu, whose down-turned head was so narrow that his dark black nose resembled the dot beneath an exclamation point. To Maarit’s surprise, Mimu did not resist the American’s touch or even growl.

“What name?” he asked Maarit in her language, which he obviously spoke only in brain-damaged form.

She told him, in English.

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s his name.”

He lowered into a squat to look Mimu in the eye. “Mimu the mean,” he said. Apparently this gratified Mimu, who seemed to relax a little, even going so far as to sit, his head lifting in that arrogant greyhound way. The guy looked up at Maarit, squinting. “And what’s your name?”

She told him.

He smiled. “All the girls’ names here are so pretty.”

“Do you want something?” Maarit was annoyed now.

He shrugged. “Everything I want, I’ve got.”

At this, Maarit tried not to smile. Displays of confidence, even when boldly affected, were one of her weaknesses. “You talk like an idiot.”

“I’m not a tourist,” he said. “I know who you are. We actually live three doors away from each other.”

She did not respond. If this was a line, Maarit would give him nothing.

“I’m in eight Rataskaevu. Top floor. You’re twelve. No idea what floor you live on.”

“Top floor.”

“Aren’t we both fancy?”

She started away; the guy stood. “Hey,” he said, keeping pace beside her, “your dog attacked me. The least you can do is join me for a drink. My name’s Ken.”

“You want to drink in the afternoon?”

“I often drink in the afternoon.”

She looked at him. Her decision wheel spun around inside her and stopped, decisively. “Where?”

“Eight Rataskaevu happens to have an excellent bar.”

She laughed. “I am not going to your apartment.”

“I’ve got other things there. Fun things. Fun things for fancy people.”

She said nothing, slightly and suddenly afraid of him now.

He sighed, picked a piece of grass from his sweater, rolled it into a ball, and flicked it away. “Look. You’re friends with Jaanus Kask, right?” He looked around, as though invoking this name had been potentially unwise. “I know him, too.”

Jaanus Kask was someone Maarit saw fairly frequently, though he was hardly her favorite person on this earth. She liked very much what he was able to get for her, though.

“I don’t like doing coke alone,” he said.

Funny thing: neither did Maarit.

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Houdini at 40

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Posted on August 29, 2011 in

Handcuffed and head down in the tank
two and a half minutes behind
the black velvet curtain, deadbolts
across the opening and nothing
but the sound of water filling my ears, I discover
myself on the verge of a possible mistake.  This is to say

I meant for Anatole to leave me bound this time round;
the longer the lapping occurs in my head,
the closer I come to the governance of happiness.  I am truly
singing in here, not drowning but singing, and if only you

could hear me strumming in this little ocean
of sleep, you would know this is my real gift; to sleep
through the séance of my life, awakened only
by the cleverest of parlour tricks—waxy eggs sliding
through ear canals and leaden pencils
pulled through long fingers.  There is nothing
that disarms me like milk-cans full of pennies

and your heart, nothing that unlocks me
like disremembering the dead who tell heaven
through blue flame, nothing secretly more disheartening
than the idea of an afterlife that means I will have to live

on beyond the chains of this one, clasped and traveling
from one watery cylinder to the next, proving myself again
the prince of air.  If cuffed and spun long enough
will I forget how you forgot how to
kiss me that night, how your mouth

is still the dark space my hand slips into before pulling
the blinking yellow canary from the crushed velvet
of a gentleman’s top hat?  If I let the burble of water
that asks to be my breath back into the pockets of lungs,

can I have you back again, telling me over pans of apple betty
skate blades on the frozen Danube
and a girl’s magic is cutting men’s hearts to lace?  Anatole
slips the bolt, unbraids the clank from my hands, the coil
of what I know I can escape from.  I flip myself
rightside up, dripping like a newborn,
ready to pretend I have willed myself alive.

 

Heather Altfeld is a lecturer at California State University, Chico, and the board chair of Blue Oak Charter School. She is at work completing an untitled manuscript of poems. “Houdini at 40″ appears in ZYZZYVA‘s Fall issue.

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