Winter 2021 - Fast Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Hand over hand, fishermen hauled cod, haddock,
flattened slippery silver against drying walls.

you stopped to take a leak
he stopped to take a peak
and then what, you got married?
how boring

I’ll be the first to admit it.
As another swaying casualty,
I do admire your suspension
technique. Your feast and famine.
Your field and fasten. Yes,
how you slung up that wasp.
How like a construction-
paper crown reality now appears.
The rhomboid jewels losing
what little span scissors
and tints lent them. Like sage
leaves giving way to their grey floss.
I still don’t know your name.
Or maybe you told me and I
404 Error. My index of memories
obsolesced. The heraldry
shrunk to point. Classification codes
dropped their prefixes. Wait,
maybe I do now remember.
Your given name. Isn’t it
404 Error. My mom’s name.
Brother’s too. The name I cry out
in the direction of my shoe
in the rust bluing of morning.
When I try to make something,
anything, move. “First things first,”
404 Error. Who’s or what’s to blame.
Having used up so much silk
and hunger, the wasp twists
in its terminal cocoon.
It’s not actually requesting
an apology. No. That’s a salute.

“Joint fluid,” said the physician, spilled
                              from a sprung seal in the ultimate knuckle
of my left index finger, just shy of the nail,
                              and gathering there to a “mixoid cyst,”
a substance also called “digital mucus.”
                              Once a woman with beautiful hands
said to me, “There are very few physical pleasures
                              without a little mucus.”
But when this doctor with an expensive
                              lancet lanced it, there oozed from my mixoid cyst
a viscid substance vastly more limpid than semen
                              or vaginal secretions. It was like a tear
wept by a fly-sized golden butterfly—
                              and when I touched the tiny glistening orb of it
with the pad of my opposite index finger, it clung
                              to the print’s whorls, and when I swirled it
against the pad of my thumb I understood
                              my body will never repay me
for the satisfactions I give it every day by moving.
                              O itty-bitty pure lubricious gobbet,
O most licentious and merest whit betwixt the pads
                              of index finger and thumb
slid together so lusciously the joints between my carpal
                              and metacarpal bones thrummed a hum
through every atom of my corpus
                              from this side of corpsehood all the way back
to the slither and divot of my conception,
                              which the doctor, seeing the look on my face,
closed his eyes before the lust and rapture of.

honeydew, hold me—
haggle over my seeds
with your
own— flower

over hovering
above hinging
upon you—
I like you in

We stayed inside
and drew red trains

we ate burritos
like it was the end

the air was sweeter
for a good long while

(For Sarah)

The last poem I will ever write
will be like the first dream I ever

wrote down, when I was green like a lawn
that did not know it was not the world,

I don’t exactly think I will.
I don’t exactly wish I don’t.
The science is inexact, and don’t
Think it won’t splice you
As you swish by
On your two-stroke motor
Scooter with your bright visor
Held aloft for all to topple.
Your orbit is unseeming.
It takes you in, like a market
Spilling futures
On the livestock you are
On the soybeans you aspire to
And the husks and straws
Baking your energy
Into meticulous kitty litter crypto
Currency in the metabolic
Cycle you were born for:
Come and see yourself
By and by, baby-naked and
Time-begrimed
In your coin-op space scope.
Its azimuth is lacking
Its optics are exacting
And can smother
Grainy eggs of the tiniest
Horned reptile
Secreted in the stream bed
You once took to.
It might feel like something
To feel something capturing you
In milled mirroring lenses
As you are and would be
But that self-love is
Nostalgia.

I made a playlist of songs I’d heard in Heaven
mostly to procrastinate the letters of rec due soon
the notes to thank Saeed and Deborah an intro
to a talk the announcement of the talk and a talk
itself though not the talk I’m talking about a
different talk. Homeless is the heart, I’d call it.
The talk I’ve yet to write and yet to talk.
Uncertain is the mind. I remember a time I had
no desk to clutter, no meals and no regular address.
Just the crushed can car I slept in. A town so small
a wind had nothing to scatter when it blew through.
I parked myself on the farthest side of the levee,
away from homes and watched the river riffle
slowly over cowbelly silt. Listened for scaups
or cops on patrol. The music of Heaven so far
away. The sounds of earth are hard to find and
harder still to catalog. A hard field amplifies each
hornet. A woman I knew not well but well enough
she considered me a last resort, someone to escort
her to a movie down in Sac. I had no cents even.
Scraped the last of it out of the glovebox to buy
cigarettes. So I declined. And every whisper being
overheard, in turn another woman asked how come
I’d turned the first one down. Then gave me a ten.
Oh, but I can’t, I said, I can’t pay this back, I have
no job and don’t know when…but don’t you under
stand, she said, when someone just wants to give.
She gave me such a look. And a stick of gum.
This is the thank you note I haven’t written.
This is the talk I have yet to give some future
me, a scattered kid. I’ll name it after a song by Diz.

Uncomprehending, overwhelming, combative
Regressive, regretful, insincere
Engulfed, disgraced, contrary, forgotten
Misbegotten, misshapen, miscellaneous mister.
Unscrupulous, overweening comrade-in-arms.
Regicidal regimental insectivore.
Englishman dispatched convivially forth,
Misty missiles misfiring mischievously.
Underwater ova combing
Regal regions inland.
Engines disbursing countrified fucks
Mislead meshugana Miss Mishkin.
Missing-the-mark, misery mistakes miso
For continental dish engendering
Insubordinate regurgitas—pregnancy—
Combustible overcoats—until
Dingdong: Helmeted wombats
Caress egrets, sinkholes.
Fried rice condoms go
Begging apes for cellophane terraria.
U owe community
Wreathes, rental-income, inch-long
Engravings your racist coot forges.
Miss us, miscreant? Miss missing?
Apprehensive, well-meaning, we’ve
Aggressively retched in sync,
Unfed, effaced, eerily gotten,
Gotten by happenstance, skeletally, Sir.

The service must have just ended,
because the boys in their dark suits

and the girls in their skirts and dresses
were spilling through the open doors

The following are a collection of three microfictions.

TO SQUEEZE

The problem with James was that the company only needed one. One Jame. The efficiency consultant’s report made it clear that a single Jame would suffice.

As a girl, Abu was a grief-eater. This was before she came to the city with a jaw full of pennies. Whenever someone died, families hired grief-eaters to enter the deceased person’s home and eat everything they owned. That way, the dead person’s belongings can be reincarnated too, carried in my mother’s belly and rebirthed through her intestines. Grief-eaters are always women, Abu says. I’ve eaten everything. Belts, clothes. Dishes, knives. Furniture takes a while. It wears down your teeth. That’s why mine are titanium-capped. I’ve eaten cats, snakes, fish-tanks. Bed-frames, mattresses too. I’ve eaten every species of shoe. I’ve eaten clocks, watches. I went to bed with my belly ticking. I could tell the time without even looking at anything. Something was counting the hours inside me.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His new book of fiction, Cleanness (2020), was published in January 2020. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it has been longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. Cleanness was also named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.

Hannah La Follette Ryan is the New York based photographer behind @subwayhands, a viral Instagram account which showcases portraits of strangers’ hands on the subway and boasts over 250 thousand followers. Poetry board member Ezra Lebovitz and design board member Anna Correll spoke with her via email this January about her work, her method, and the rules of subway decorum.

George Saunders is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His new book of fiction, Cleanness (2020), was published in January 2020. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it has been longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. Cleanness was also named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.

Hannah La Follette Ryan is the New York based photographer behind @subwayhands, a viral Instagram account which showcases portraits of strangers’ hands on the subway and boasts over 250 thousand followers. Poetry board member Ezra Lebovitz and design board member Anna Correll spoke with her via email this January about her work, her method, and the rules of subway decorum.

George Saunders is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.