I want to write an
honest sentence. Once upon a time a mother duck adopted 76 ducklings.
She put them all in row, of course, just as I've come up with two
sore thumbs, sticking out like puffy masts from the frigates of my
hands. To tell the honest truth, I never thought it'd come to this,
lies buried as deep as Troy and heretofore as hidden as the horse.
Only the naked and the dead are true, though the bearded man who
pisses in the sea could be said to have evaded that rule. I'd thought he'd identify with Hannah in Nanette, but instead he took the
part of the straight white man. His anger kept me awake at night;
hers kept him. Pretend you're holding a scalding object and drop it
on the ground. Pretend the ground is solid ice. But back
to the drop; it eases the pain of your burning hand, the one that
stands in for your heart. The peach is an ambiguous symbol, as the
girl is left to carry her pit from the scene of the crime. We
eat our accusers like the goat at the petting zoo who took the boy's
map. It comes back as a multi-colored globe. The novel has a
protagonist who listens, known only by her name. As she transcribes,
her ears grow larger and larger until they resemble the goat's
enclosure, path around a small island populated by rocks and short
grass. One goat sits behind a sign that cautions
against touching it. A stress-free zone. I tell him the point of the
monologue was to disown anger, to ease the tension by refusing to
create it. But she did. On that stage, the dyke Lear lamented all
those who'd betrayed her. Not daughters, men. Two rapes and an
attack. First as farce, then as crime. I spilled two cups of water on
my bare feet, then nearly ran into a sergeant in uniform in the
parking lot. She in her white car, I in mine. I had slipped my troubled teen on like a cape, but thumbs couldn't undo the tie
around my neck. To hang oneself is an act of anger, she said, as someone has to cut you down. But there's always discovery; the edge
of that continent was as sharp as a knife. Call a dead woman by her
name, the land by its.
--26 July 2018
