Interview with Janelle Lynch

What attracted you to the site where the River series occurs?
The beautiful architectural ruins and the sensation of loss that pervaded the place. The river itself—its colors, textures. The light. It was a visceral draw, more than a cerebral one.

Your images depict a decaying built environment, partly taken over by nature, partly becoming its own distinct nature. What is your relationship to the built environment and the natural world?

Architecture has, indeed, influenced my photographic work, but not so specifically until my later work in Spain, where I lived, worked, and traveled extensively, from 2007-2011. My Barcelona project (2007-2011) and monograph (Radius Books, 2013) show distinct influence by Frank Gehry, particularly his work in Spain—the Marqués de Riscal Vineyard Hotel in Elciego, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and by Antoni Gaudí, specifically his Casa Milà and Park Güell in Barcelona.

Now that I’ve said that I realize that in the River work, I was anthropomorphizing the foreground architecture—buildings, pylons—in the images, something that I have done instinctively in most of my work, including in the landscape. Human qualities and experiences of strength, independence, isolation are suggested through my choice of subject matter and in my formal and technical decisions.

In many of these selected images, you reveal the larger context of the river, with the opposite bank and its buildings showing in the background. Without that contextualization the images would have appeared abstract. What informed this choice of framing/perspective?

While I was viscerally drawn, as I said above, to the change and loss of history in the foreground, along the river, I was interested in the new buildings and park and recreation space that were being built on both sides of it. The implication of loss with the possibility of renewal and growth informed my compositions.

It is always a gray, overcast day. Did you shoot these photographs during a particular season, time of day, and time period? Why did you photograph at this time?

Yes, I made all of the work between November and February during 2000-2001, and 2005-2006, mostly in the early morning. I was interested in how the cool, diffused quality of the light could support the emotional undercurrent in the images. (The project was interrupted by my move to Mexico City in 2002.)

There are no people discernible in these images—even where possible, on the intact piers, the partially rocky or vegetated foregrounds (in a few images), or a passing boat. Is there a “loneliness” to these images—or is that not quite the right word or are words too limiting? Perhaps it is easier to answer the broader question: why are there no people in these images?

The word “loneliness” is apt. While the work functions as a historical urban record, it is motivated by personal experience. The choice to not include any people was deliberate.

When you introduced this work to me you revealed that you often run on this segment of Riverside. Running seems very different than walking, standing, or sitting. Did the experience (mental, physical, or spiritual) of running past these landscapes in any way inform these images?

I started running—in warm weather only—along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan when I moved to the West Village in 1995. That’s how I got to know the cityscape and riverfront. But, as I recall now, it was on a walk to the river in 1999 when I saw the construction equipment poised to begin removing the pier at Christopher Street that I knew I had to make the work.

Is there something fundamentally ritualistic about your work?

I haven’t ever really thought about it in those terms, but the answer is yes. In fact, there is a strong ritualistic foundation to my practice. Over the years—I’ve been working now for about 25—the rituals have changed and evolved. And they are different for each body of work.

For River, the ritual involved working at specific times of day, lighting conditions, and in a particular season. I walked alone with my camera—a 4×5-inch view camera, with a portrait lens—up and down the West Side of Manhattan. Just the use of the camera alone involves ritual. Setting it up on a tripod. Going under the dark focusing cloth to compose the image, which appears through the lens on the ground glass upside down and reverse, since there is no mirror in the camera. My process of composing an image is very ritualistic—slow and methodical. In the often long amount of time that it takes me to compose and focus the image, what I’ve come to think of as a mysterious transmission occurs in the private, quiet space under the focusing cloth between the subject that I see through the lens and myself—all that I bring to that moment—my response to the subject, to the light, the place, the time, my personal history, my references all meet to create an image. As I work over time and print and study the pictures, the themes begin to reveal themselves and I make discoveries about the subject, the creative process, the world, and myself.

How does this series fit into your overall oeuvre?

River explores themes that were central to my work from 1999, the year I finished my MFA in Photography, until 2014—themes of absence, presence, transcendence, and the life cycle. Since then the themes that have organically evolved explore the intersection of spirituality, science, personal and social healing, community, family, poetry, and beauty.

Please talk a little bit about your technical practice. What attracts you to the large-format camera and print? Which camera or cameras do you use and have you experimented with others? Did you use a particular camera, lens, etc., for this project and, if so, why?

For this body of work, I used the Toyo 4×5 view camera, the same camera I had been using for several years, and a portrait lens, which implies my tendency toward anthropomorphization. When I finished the work, I started using a Deardorff 8×10 view camera. It allows for a slow, contemplative (or ritualistic!) process that is very much akin to my nature. I love the experience under the dark cloth, as I described above. I have used the 8×10 exclusively since 2006.

Some of these structures alongside the river have a plasticity reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s work; they evoke sculpture. Are there any artists that have shaped not only what you see (or want to see, i.e., what captivates you) but also how you see?

Stephen Shore was an early influence (and teacher and mentor), specifically through his orientation to formal rigor and the importance of presence of attention. Stephen is the one who encouraged me to use the 8×10. Joel Sternfeld was also a teacher and his emphasis on the expressive potential of light deeply informed my choices in River.

Yes, as I mentioned above, Gehry has influenced my work, particularly my work in Spain. I was also aware of that reference when I made Untitled 10 [the second image above], from the series River, to which you refer. Rothko was an early influence. Charles Burchfield has been a major influence since 2006, after I finished the River series. Jackson Pollack and Joan Mitchell have been significant influences, particularly for my Walls series, from Barcelona.

Poets, philosophers, and writers have made an impact on my practice. Barthes’ Camera Lucida informed River and his diaries informed my work in Spain. Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Rebecca Solnit, Alan Lightman, John O’Donohue, and Wendell Berry have all been perhaps the most important references of all.

“Could it be cancer?” I asked her.

She most certainly recognized the fear in my eyes, so she offered some comforting words along the lines of, this is common for a man your age, it’s usually nothing, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In a panic, I scheduled an appointment with the specialist for the very next week.  When I went in for my first visit, I was confronted with the obligatory voluminous paperwork.  As I sat in the unfamiliar waiting room, I started to fill out the first form.  When I came to the line “OCCUPATION” I printed: “Attorney.”  I stared at that lonely word that was meant to be the sum of my identity.

After a moment, I added: “…and Writer.”

This was a first for me: I had never included my “other” life on official paperwork—other than on my tax returns—so I felt a bit of a rush.

At that point sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, I had been a practicing lawyer for almost three decades.  But I had been a published author just shy of twenty years.  I had seven books of fiction and nonfiction under my belt, with two more that would be published in 2017.  My stories, essays, and poetry had been widely anthologized including by the venerable W. W. Norton whose anthologies every English major uses in college.  I had dozens of bylines including one with The New York Times.  My books were taught in Latinx studies classes across the country and carried in hundreds of libraries worldwide.  My fiction had been analyzed and categorized in books by professors of literature.

Thus, by every measure, I was a writer.  Full stop.

But as I sat in the waiting room, the words of an attorney friend were rattling about in my head.  I had mentioned one of my recent publications, and he said that I was pretty prolific “for a part-time writer.”

Part-time?

True, I do not have an MFA, and my primary income as well as of my health benefits come from my full-time attorney job.

But the “part-time” epithet stung.  I don’t know many full-time writers.  The vast majority of my writer friends teach at universities.  Are they “part-time” writers?  

Very few writers—think Stephen King—make a living from the words they put on paper.  But I would never call the published barista, copywriter, or store clerk part-time writers.  A writer is a writer is a writer.

After handing in my paperwork, I went in to meet with the specialist.  We discussed my health history and the series of medical tests that I should undergo.  Then he said: “So, you’re a writer?”

He skipped right over the “attorney” part.

“Yes,” I said.

He swiveled around to his computer and Googled my name.

“Wow!” he said.  “You’re famous.”

I laughed.  “No, not quite.”

“But look,” he implored, showing me his search results.  “You have a lot of books.”

I demurred, said that my books are mostly known by those who teach and love Latino literature.

Undeterred, he asked me which book he should start with.  I said that I primarily wrote short stories but that I had published a well-received novel a few years back and told him the title which he dutifully wrote down.

“I’m going to order your book,” he said.  We then got back to the business at hand and he said we should schedule an MRI and biopsy.

I am happy to say that all of my test results came back fine, and my small emotional detour to “what if I have…” ended as abruptly as it started.

But I had entered a new world where I admitted that I was (dammit!) a writer.

My wife is also in the legal profession—we were law school sweethearts—so we attend many law-related dinners and conferences.  When introducing me to her lawyer friends, she will often mention that I am a writer, not just an attorney.  Inevitably, the response is one of complete acceptance and interest.

“A writer!” one of her friends said at one event.  “I’ve always wanted to write.  What have you written?”

These encounters fill me with great joy because there is a complete and unabashed acceptance of my identity as a writer.  They also allow me to pull out one of my time-worn jokes when I’m asked, “How do you find the time?”

I always respond: “I don’t golf.”

While this always evokes a laugh, it’s true.  Many attorneys recreate by golfing or watching hours of sports on television.  I use those hours—usually on the weekends and during holidays—to type away at my laptop, working on a new story or poem or essay.  And just last year, I wrote my first full-length play which was selected by a well-regarded theatre here in Los Angeles for a staged Zoom reading in July.  Writing.  That’s how I recreate, in the truest sense of the word.

Conversely, my identity as an attorney almost never comes up at the many literary conferences and book festivals to which I am invited to discuss fiction and poetry.  Indeed, it’s relatively easy in literary settings to avoid discussing what I do to make a living even though I don’t keep it a secret.

In March of last year, I attended AWP’s annual writing conference which was held in beautiful Portland, Oregon.  This was not my first time—I’d attended about a half dozen over the years and either moderated or participated on panels to discuss such things as Latinx literature, magical realism, and similar topics.  But last year, I was one of five writers on a panel titled, “Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Writers on Employment Outside of Academia.”  And we packed the room, we who made a living in law, finance, tech, and forestry while making time to write—and publish—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

In my then twenty years of being a published author, I don’t think I ever had been on a panel where the primary purpose was to explain to a group of writers that I earn my living doing something other than writing.  I enjoyed sharing stories of juggling litigation deadlines and conference calls with crafting short stories and appearing at book festivals and guest lecturing at colleges.  After a lively discussion and reading, the panel ended, and three young attorneys (strangers to each other) approached in quick succession and thanked me for giving them hope.  Interestingly, not one asked me if I considered myself primarily a writer or lawyer.

But if I’ve learned one thing since that doctor’s visit back in 2015, it’s that my identity is not a binary choice.  I am both a writer and attorney.  To quote Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

And shouldn’t we all embrace our multitudes?  I am a writer and an attorney, but I am also a husband, father, Chicano, Jew-by-choice, son, brother.  I am numerous things and wear many hats.  I am not part-time anything.

So, hello, my name is Daniel, and I am a writer.

A starts a conversation in her head and leaves you to catch up once the sentences have made their way through the vocal channels. It’s no use expecting anything more sympathetic. Her thoughts are her own after all. This is a sporadic yet predictable tendency, and makes for a dialogue that’s essentially a series of loopholes, a scavenger hunt for the right detail that will complete the picture. She is telling me ​​about a memory in Ukraine except her narrative keeps coiling around a grudge she still holds against this person focal to the story and it’s hard to get the facts right. In the middle of it suddenly we are transported to an exhaustive description of the man’s bad breath or this seemingly trivial report of an alleged misdeed he had apparently carried out with full intent to hurt A’s feelings, or –the opposite still—an elaborate account of a joy so meticulously archived, it overrides the plot without further ado. Most times the memory is lost somewhere between the forest of diversions and my thoughts wander off to my own crude recollections of our childhood domains. 19 years later, they seem more like a series of uploaded fragments.

There’s the story when A and I almost set the house on fire; there’s the vague (almost fictional) time D and I went to live at a sanatorium apparently long enough to attend the local school; there’s the time V ripped his thigh open with an exposed nail while sliding down the roof with D; the time we sold our own home-picked cherries on the highway side; the time we lived on “the land” for the summer and earned a ​​bunch of snack cash and swam in the makeshift “pond”; the time we slept on top of the haystack beneath the stars; the time we had no food and mom’s heart broke because her children stopped crying from hunger and merely accepted it as fact; so many stories that eventually become stale and redundant with time. Memory is stifled by time too, and each detail that once lighted the way to joy– get forgotten by accident between the lines, erased by conditions and circumstances, but more importantly, by new and more relevant memories. I suppose joy prefers a certain expansive proximity. And you can’t live on expired joy for too long, you have to learn to manufacture it from scratch.

This is where my thoughts stray while A drives us to another place where we sit and talk some more, A enjoying the audience and me secretly noting her intricate, eccentric patterns—the paths words take, spoken and unspoken. Surely, no one else muses just so.

II.

Two weeks prior, on my way back to Lviv, I pass through a train station in Kiev where, I am shocked to find out, I was unknowingly robbed. I call my mom who laughs at me for a good while and tells me a story about an old man who, after 30 years visits his home country from America. She describes him with her euphonic folksy Russian, to be passionately arriving in the airport, falling on his knees to tearfully, tenderly kiss the ground of his homeland: “At last! my Motherland, I, your prodigal son! Back to the sacred soil of my Home!” and so on and so forth he went on sniveling, emoting his pleasure at this enormous honor. Once he had felt that he accurately conveyed his esteem, turning around, he suddenly saw his baggage absolutely missing! After many hours of dealing with airport security, the police, and local authorities, this fervent man left the premises huffing and puffing, entirely exasperated at the audacity of thieves to target him so—an innocent pilgrim! (she takes a brief pause to deliver a hearty guffaw) Then, turning to his wife, he groaned, “I can’t wait to come back to our little house in America. I will kiss every brick down the lawn path to our darling front door. In any event, no one will take our baggage!” With what I imagine as little tears in the corner of her eyes from cackling in my direction, my mom closes her tale and pronounces for additional emphasis, (as moms tend to do), “That’s you and that’s your sentimentality, Marina. Keep. An eye. On your bags!” Thusly, she hangs up and I, defenseless against this contagious delight, find myself feeling easier, lighter. In my locket I carry three grains of wheat I picked up in a field near our hometown a couple of weeks ago. When I shake it against my ear, I can hear their delicate rustle.

III.

It’s true that this past summer I went to Ukraine in search of some missing remnant—a distinctive belonging that I only identify now by its absence. But what is to Ukraine my identity crisis? An absurdity at best. A trait so irrelevant and oblivious that it’s laughable and only proves the distance that 19 years has carved between me and the person I would’ve become, should I have stayed. Without really wanting to admit it, I sought pretty desperately to get a hold of a little validation. I wanted to be claimed by my people, and to bring that claim back home with me, to clutch it in my pocket for safety—a most prized possession. But I resisted it because I knew how it must look to real Ukrainians, how aloof and self-indulgent to afford that kind of opulent craving, while most hunger for food and rent, for gas, for political stability, for financial security, or a hope for one. For blatant corruption to cease its irreverent grip on the everyday livelihood of its citizens. However.

 On two separate occasions two men in two different cities had the startling conviction to contradict my own uncharitable conclusions about myself. And with such a quick and unembellished grace and with the same, carbon-copy statement they astounded me, “No, you’re not American, you’re ours.”

A compliment I defined and accepted in my mind as deliberate and therefore entirely indisputable. Please understand, the logic is airtight.

The first time it happened, I was eating stuffed peppers in someone’s backyard, surrounded by friendly faces and a cat affectionately rubbing by side, purring. Later, we ate ice cream with raspberries and basil in colorful, delicate tea cups. The carbon-copy statement came in response to a harmless joke about my status. His words kept my belly warm for a long while after.

Another time it came from a police officer through a stained bureaucratic sliding window, and the declaration was positively undeniable—perhaps due to his ​​profession, or to a few stories we’ve exchanged while waiting, or that he’d served for a time in the town where I grew up, or perhaps it was his general outlook on dual citizenships, that you don’t just take a country out of a person with a thud of a stamp. Even in America. Before I left the office, he candidly asked me if I liked America better and I counted my words, heeding to pay my respects and tell the truth. It was a sunny day, and while leaning on the waiting room wall, I unwittingly collected whitewash with the back of my camo jacket. Some residue of it came to America with me where it rinsed off finally in a New York City Laundromat down through the pipes, underground and, I imagine, into the Hudson and toward the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.

IV.

I wear the layers of these thoughts like clothes. We, the Slavic diaspora, come to America to generationally forget, and to selectively salvage old traditions into something more modern, a little more profitable; like my parents used to warn us about selling your soul to the American values: the god of the dollar. And it all feels very righteous and appropriate and responsible, because wanting the best for your children and your children’s children is universal and, in fact, holy. An undeniable right to pursue life and happiness for me and mine. Here back in our hometown though, no one is transgressing rules of our heritage. No one is recycling principles, refurbishing outdated customs. Here, as before, traditions are anchors as they had always been; reminders that life moves in predictable patterns, like the seasons, like a new birth after a passing, and there is always a solace to draw from this ancient wisdom. Here, people just live and endure day to day, this mundane sameness, a comfort and a bondage simultaneously (this sameness that the diaspora had seemingly surpassed). They’re not familiar with this violence of assimilation that we co-sign in the name of our own, different, cultural survival. But they are intimate with many other violences around, the less subtle, more abrupt and immediate, physical and mental violences of war and alcoholism, and scarcity and debt so monstrous, it eats people: body, mind, and soul. The evident and the yet undiscovered landmines of the refugee who fled and the refugee who stayed.

V.

They say each Ukrainian vyshivanka has dedicated regional patterns. Everywhere you look, someone is selling them on the streets; I am told by a local that they’re ordered from a manufacturer in China, and I begin to ask the sellers if they know who’d stitched the ones hanging up for sale. Sometimes I get an aggravated look, sometimes they say it was their cousin or a sister-in-law. When the vyshivanka is cheap, I can tell they’re lying. It looks like it was machine-made and kind of clumsy all over. But I’m looking for a specific design from the eastern side, with the certain symbols between the stitches. Historically, these designs are meant to be a ritual of archiving the ancestral bond, something our grandparents used to honor, and their parents and grandparents, many generations into the past.

All Ukrainian embroidery shares certain symbols: floral, geometric, zoomorphic and so on. The cross represents light overcoming darkness, the rectangle represents a fruitful field, a peacock symbolizes youth and happiness; two peacocks facing each other stands for a new family. Eastern Ukraine (Donbas, parts of which now essentially belong to Russia) brags delicate threadwork patterns and cut-outs, bright blue tones, and harsher geometric textures for effect (compared to the multi-colored, circular shapes of its western counterparts) and they are sublime. To an untrained eye, the designs may appear too similar, but they carry codes and symbols of each individual cultural domain—a little secret, its own type of literacy: if you know you know. 

I have one hanging in my closet that I’m reading to myself and interpreting the nuances the best way I know how. This particular vyshivanka came from my mother’s hometown near the Belorussian border, a town that literally translates as The Old Village. A place I, regretfully, did not visit on my trip. I have to imagine someone more Ukrainian than me stitched some meaning and affection into the material and when I wear it, I can carry some of that history on my body too even here in New York City.

Every little bit counts.

VI.

Yes, forgetting is cultural erasure. First, individual, familial forgetting that takes only decades to achieve. Personally, I have to speculate: when do we make any collective contact with those people who sat in the airplane chairs for the first time crossing the Atlantic? Flying over Mt. Rainier that we would later hike casually with our aunts and uncles a decade later? I do think we collectively forget; first, the experiences that are unpleasant and too heavy to hold in memory, the experiences that brought us to the desperation which made us flee, made us abandon. Yes, I was old enough to still transmit my own survivor’s guilt. How many others deserved this chance and would have probably made something more of themselves? Something less fearful? But it was my ass in the airplane seat, my purple jean overalls, my chestnut hair braided behind me, my baby sister not crying, her chubby fingers trailing around the window following the massive cloud shapes outside. I am sipping on the complimentary apple juice and wondering what else they’ll bring around in those carts.

After we land in Sacramento, I only remember that it is nighttime and outside the car window, we see our first palm tree pass by, zooming in and growing exponentially. I don’t remember too many other firsts. Everything happens too fast, and then it ends and is quickly replaced with more events that equally need remembering. Not right away, but in generational time, it seems to happen instantaneously. Bloop, you’re an American. What do you see when you stop to look back? Stale, reiterated and deflated images that used to spark bragging. If this is what happens to a family, what does it look like to an entire generation? All the Slav friends I had growing up who are now taking their own kids to Russian school on Saturdays, or to grandma’s (who still speaks the mother tongue), or settle for a few cute phrases here and there.

In college I prided myself on residing between the veils, swearing I was some con artist jumping from one world to the next at whim, electing the more noble aspects of both cultures, and disposing of the nonessentials. Man, I was so smart! It did not occur to me to evaluate the lens with which I made those very judgements: how did I come to decide what is noble? What heights was I trying to reach and who was at the top of those moral groups beckoning me forward? Nevertheless, I was the immigrant’s lucky daughter. I saw with my eyes the blindspots of society that others took for granted, all because of my magic green card and my exotic accent that I worked so hard to erase. Certainly, it was all very charming at the time. And perhaps for a time I did truly see and for that time I genuinely believed I could single-handedly resist my own assimilation.

A happy, big-headed idiot.
An impostor at best.

Today, I FaceTime my parents after work while they babysit their first grandchild and the halo of delight, euphoria even, lines the crinkles of their eyes, both sides of their ​​mouths. They look at her like she is the mother pearl, the treasure chest they found in a field, went home and sold all their belongings to purchase; like they’ve won the lottery. I don’t blame them. Who doesn’t want to give everything to their child? Who doesn’t love to have everything to give to their child? And here I am, trying to trap the past into some comprehensible, neat chronicle of what could’ve and should’ve been; questioning, double-guessing, wondering ‘what if.’ I hear my mother laughing gently in the background. Without seeing, I know she’s working the dough at the kitchen table. Somehow, she can hold the grief and the joy simultaneously while I clumsily trip and plunge into my rumination without register. I look at my niece stuffing her face with pelmeni on the screen; she’s looking at me with her deep dark eyes, then quickly flashes her two front teeth in my direction, squinting playfully. I accept it for what it is—a gift I couldn’t earn. After hanging up, I take a long walk home under my umbrella and I feel easier.

Lighter.

You were a baby like my own babies, 
brown-haired and green-eyed, 
the night your father left.

In the hollow beside your mother
                                                        you slept,
fitting your small body into the shape of a father 
who wanted to leave; leave the ghetto,
leave Poland, maybe he wanted to leave you too,
girl of my family’s ghosts.

You were a girl like I was a girl, 
pictures of me in white cardigans and lace-edged socks;
maybe your mother braided your hair
for shabbos, your scalp, like mine, stretched taut.

           Where is your sepia-edged memory?
Abandoned girl, forgotten baby, my unknown aunt.

Child of a fighter, child of red 
streaked cobblestones, child stripped 
naked in your mother’s arms, her uncovered hair 
blazed brown in the sunlight. 
 
There is no waste of ink on your once pink wrist,
not plump like my baby’s, but     taut and hungry.

No milk from your mother’s raw breasts, 
only a hollow throb for the white moon of home, 
for a father, for life
           beyond the shower walls.

“You go to my head…” —as sung by Billie Holiday

Under the loupe        enlarged about

       sixteen times        you see your own

furrowed surface:        bunched, craggy terrain

       more lunar        than human,


the brain is        like this too, beneath

       the brow, but        hush now, don’t

explain, the song        goes, these

       rows of small        mountain ranges

are not the        neurotic kind, they

       mind the curl        of the thumb, they

knuckle punch        and run—oh, but one gets

       exhausted,        body

and soul,       and whose hands

       aren’t tired        of being

reasonable        even Billie, elegantly

       armed with that        white gardenia

in her hair, when        strip searched

       on a drug raid        in a rage

stood before the        police, looked

       into their eyes        pissed on the floor

One winter                       baby there was a three-
day ice storm, and              we kept       going
fireplaces
                  heated by kerosene

Source: L’Engle, Madeleine. Two-Part Invention: the Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journal Bk. 4), by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988, p. 158    

islands

There were no “beautiful people”
                                                         in
                                                            desolation
                                                          we sailed
                                                                  the water
                                                                        accustomed
to

dislocation

Source: L’Engle, Madeleine. Two-Part Invention: the Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journal Bk. 4), by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988, p. 6

hope was my dangerous plan
outlined by sketches in notebooks
visible under the full moon.

Almost like before, how
he knew to call it sunlight
to call it a word
when it was just warmth moving.

Eventually they found us,
scattering evergreen seeds
when snow came.
I froze holding a garden hoe
and a doorjamb,
trying to remember which one
would bring his mother back.

My son survived.
They carried him over their shoulders
to safety. Tea with whiskey. Plenty.
Whether his father was alive
or not, the night had arrived
to drink with men.

“Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two,”
wrote Buckminster Fuller in 1975.

You took a photograph every ten miles
from Maine to California,
a fabrication of the unity between.

The manually created fullerene molecules
known in popular science as buckyballs
(made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons,
with a carbon atom at the vertex of each polygon
and a bond along each polygon edge)

inspired the brand-name for neodymium magnets
which, when swallowed, attract each other
causing damage throughout the alimentary canal.

348 photos.
348 lapses of motion.

What do we do with attraction and unity?
How do we save what lies between?

*

I wrote that wanting a declaration of love,
but got something else.

So, over chocolate croissants and tea,
I showed you simply how to follow the line
from Fuller to physics to toys, proud

of knowledge I’d sifted from the internet’s sand,
to which you, no fool, replied with a story

about a couple you knew who drew and repelled
each other like constantly rotating magnets.

While you spoke I watched your eyes blink,
and the way your fingers tore apart
the croissant or cradled the spoon in your tea,

and I realized the shortest distance
between two points is still a line

unifying how much we have
with how little we keep.

Poetry and Gender 101

I enter the classroom with my beard
trimmed, combed, and balmed to a sheen

by something that smells of redwood to complement
the bourbon-and-cedar soap whose ghost

lingers on my skin, and the “Oak Smoke” deodorant,
and the shampoo named for some forest god—

you’re right, of course, it’s too much wood,
the essences of too many phallic objects

smeared across my body, the musk
too masculine, or so I was promised.

diagram of

                            a face

           rollers   curve

                               like cheekbone    like

                            jawline like   eyebrow

she traces contours with a palette knife
and blends and blends and blends

              metal

                            as a   kind

                            of bone

bone as

                            a means

                                  to bend

she presses dampened¹ paper soft
against her rigid edges

what’s left    of    her

              kissed-mouth²
                                  smudge

                            her ink-lipped
                                                 smack

oils blot away her clotted red-pinks
like cold cream and water

1. “An advantage of art paper is its increased ability to absorb impression and ink when dampened with water.” (from Letterpress Printing: A manual for modern fine press printers, Paul Maravelas)

2. “Many commercial printers who formerly worked in letterpress will say, however, that ‘the type should kiss the paper.’ They were trained to print with the subtlest of impression in order to preserve the type.” (from Letterpress Printing: A manual for modern fine press printers, Paul Maravelas)

This house has many hearts.

This house has many hearts.

—Poltergeist (1982)

This rope double-knotted around your waist:

         tie one end to what you love,
the other to what scares you.

                  This possession is a splinter
         under each of your fingernails,
                             a nail between each rib-rafter,

your bloodbeat louder
         at each entrance wound:

         you possessed by a house possessed
                  by the dead possessed
                             by your daughter.

         All of this hereaftering
in your here and your now:

         your own heart hammering
                  in the walls.

Now clear your minds—it knows what scares you.

Now clear your minds—it knows what scares you.

—Poltergeist (1982)

         In your dreams of
a disembodied daughter,

                  she is blue teleglow,
         a bioluminescent voice flung

& flown like fireflies.
         She is in the night-arms

                  of the dead tree outside
         your window. You feel her

move through you like moonlight:
         so softly, with small cold hands.

                  And what now? While she’s
         spiderwebbed between here

and gone, the orb-weaver is listening
         for any disturbance of her silk threads,

                  any wind-blown cry for mother
         caught & clung there.