Prose – Seventh Wave

A Young Woman’s Guide to Self-Deportation

Meg Sykes — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:00:54 +0000

First, you wait.

Wait a year, or two, or ten. Or maybe you’ll wait two decades — squeezing through the cracks in eVerify and RealID until the bureaucratic walls grow too high and you must go under. Don’t forget to carry your first deportation order and stack of expired work permits to every cold and creaky sublease of your twenties. All the important details of your life are floating in the cloud anyway, split between hundreds of power-guzzling servers between two oceans, but you hold tight to your papers and wait like a good immigrant.

Be patient. Watch five American presidents enter the White House, drunk with power and full of promises. Watch four American presidents leave the White House, hungover with scandal and war crimes. Hold off on school and career and dentist appointments and funerals and weddings. Tell everyone the same sorry stories at the events you do go to: It’s impossible to take a loan out by yourself, there’s the ten-year ban to reenter, it’s too awkward and humiliating to explain your precarious status — can’t legally work, can’t legally drive, can’t legally stay — on the third date so it’s not worth the trouble. Cobble together a living by taking up part-time gigs, responding to ads on Craigslist, and selling your data to corporations that can maximize extracting your true value. The market’s parasitic interest in your spending capacity seems flattering compared to the country’s flat rejection of you in general.

The years will trudge on and your life will slump under the weight of your waiting, but you must try to remain optimistic like a good American. To stay busy, you will cultivate delightful delusions about the person you could be after this strange period of your life is over. You could become a landscape photographer, a pilot, a person who safely indulges in parkour with the knowledge that they have health insurance. It keeps you childish, all this potential that will never turn into momentum.

No one says anything about your emotional regression and plummeting foresight until your best friend of fifteen years finally calls out your perpetual tardiness on a Thursday night. You were late to dinner, again. She waved you into her apartment saying it didn’t matter, but now that a pile of dirty dishes and a bowl of sliced honeydew and cantaloupe divides the two of you, you’re not so sure. It would be devastating to lose your extraordinary friend to failures of attention and timekeeping. Sometimes, when you realize in the middle of the night that you didn’t respond to yet another “how are you?” missive because you once again didn’t know what to say to that, you think of showing up to her door with a bottle of wine and a bag of soggy takeout to apologize and explain yourself. But you never do because her boyfriend stays over all the time and you wouldn’t want to interrupt his sleep or worse — risk him interrupting your conversation. More and more, you feel self-conscious about how your desire to be close to her has not changed but she has. It is not her fault she has other people in her life and you do not.

Your friend abruptly announces, “I think you’re depressed.”

You take a chunk of each melon and chew both at the same time, hoping the fusion of two similar but distinct flavors will bring a unique tasting experience. It doesn’t. Your friend looks expectant, but you are only thinking how funny she is when she tries to be serious. You have spent so much time waiting for this country to reform, for the rain to come, for winter to end, and for what? Things are fine as long as she’s around and it’s just the two of you goofing around.

“I don’t think so,” you tell her. Then you suggest trying both fruits at once.

As you step out of her building, you run into your friend’s boyfriend and exchange small talk on the stairs. He discloses that he’s planning on proposing to your friend soon. He inquires after her preferences and your blessings. You give them both freely — your friend deserves all forms of happiness. With stunning ease, you can envision the trajectory of your friend’s life because she is brilliant and beautiful and destined for great things; meanwhile, you can barely picture the next day of your own life. It’s as if your timeline has fallen out of sync with the rest of the world’s, as if you’ve fallen so far behind your peers and catching up will remain impossible.

After many years, it will dawn on you that you are not waiting for Congress, you are waiting for yourself to become crooked and hopeless enough to become capable of leaving. Slowly, painfully, inevitably, the circumstances of your life will catch up to you until one afternoon, you will wake up in a dim room and wonder how you lasted this long. You will peel yourself out of bed, pick a date, and buy a suit.

Second, you face Immigration.

On a Monday of your choice (wearing clothes you have also chosen), you’ll walk into the regional office of the Department of Homeland Security. Years ago, you watched a documentary on cows being readied for slaughter and you recognized their confused, fearful gaze as your own through the display monitors of countless security cameras. Now, years later, you peer into the same screen; your eyes merely look dull, like a cow’s after its brains have been scrambled with a metal prodding gun in an abattoir.

When the baby-faced officer waves you through the metal detector and asks you which office you’re heading toward, you know exactly which floor and what cubicle they’ll process you in. You’ve been here before. You’ve done this a dozen times for DACA before the previous president finally made good on his promise to ax it, and you remember the protests, how people fussed and fumed for three weeks before something else urgent and unjust overtook the national limelight. You remember the rage and also the relief — relief because you were at last free of the guillotine that hung above you, because some awful clarity finally sliced through all those years of maybe, if you’re good, if we feel like it, and the legal revocation tasted more like a cure than a poison.

When the elevator opens and the receptionist waves you forward, you’ll say, I would like to turn myself in for deportation.

When the receptionist tells you that you are in the wrong place, they don’t do that here, this is for biometrics only, try “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” on floor eight, you thank her and go downstairs and repeat yourself.

“Do you have a deportation order against you?” asks the person on floor eight. You give him an expired driver’s license and the deportation order that you do have, the one that has haunted you for longer than it has existed.

“This isn’t yours,” he says. He’s right, technically. The papers are addressed to your parents, not that it matters to them — they don’t live here anymore. “I wasn’t supposed to be here either,” you say.

“Unfortunately, a discretionary grant of voluntary departure is only relevant to people in custody. As you do not have a current or outstanding deportation motion against you, there’s not much we can do,” he says.

“Can you file one for me?”

“We are currently prioritizing the removal of criminals or repeat offenders —” he begins to explain. You cut him off.

“So you want me to commit a crime, then?”

Your own disdain and brusqueness toward a customer service employee doing their job surprises you a little.

“Miss, you are free to leave the country as you please.”

In your head, you go through the list of your personal lows, the things that could be flagged as criminal within certain shades of the law: Contributing five dollars to a senate campaign a decade ago because you didn’t know that you would be a foreign national interfering with democracy, driving without a permit, driving under the influence, driving over a hundred miles per hour that one time, being cruel to your parents.

“Listen,” the receptionist says. He scans the empty waiting room. “I can tell you’re young. It’s not your fault your parents broke the law. You remind me of a gal my son went to school with. It’s real unfortunate that good kids like you are in this situation, but you’re not helping yourself by coming here like this.”

Your body heats up at this insipid take. It’s insulting to be seen as a child when you are more than old enough to have one yourself. You have already dissected the “good immigrant kid, bad immigrant mommy” dichotomy spouted by every hopeless lip-service legislation. You have already deconstructed the framing of who is entitled to citizenship and who must beg for it. You have already analyzed the national amnesia behind who exactly started the wars, plundered the resources, and overthrew the governments elsewhere to necessitate so many of you coming here in the first place. But America isn’t ashamed of its imperialism, so you won’t apologize for squatting.

“All right,” you say.

You walk back to the elevator, past security, through the revolving doors. You step into the stark sun, no ankle trackers or hand shackles or deportation orders in sight. If you want to leave a country that doesn’t want you, you’ll have to do it yourself. In the parking lot of the USCIS office, you book a flight on your phone.

It takes six minutes.

Third, you go to Walmart.

You could have ordered everything online and a drone would have dropped your items off in four hours or “your money back guaranteed,” but you craved the full Wally World experience. You wanted to glide down the cool, fluorescent aisles and pick up bags of candy, rub the sleeves of polyester sweaters, flip through cheap paperbacks. Time and weather don’t exist inside a Walmart, but cell reception does. Your phone vibrates with your mother’s name. She’s calling from another time zone.

You answer in the language she knows best and you know barely. Now that you are an adult, your mother speaks to you over the phone with soft authority and sudden humor, neither of which were displayed during your childhood. You ask about her health and she asks about your upcoming flight. She tells you not to be nervous. She likes giving impractical advice: don’t be stressed, don’t be sad. You pretend to heed it. She asks where you are and when you answer, she says,

“Walmart! Remember when I lost you there? I searched everywhere. Eventually, a kid moving shopping carts saw me crying while I kept circling the parking lot. He took me inside to customer service and there you were, sleeping behind the counter. Someone had taken you there because you were lost. When they asked you for my name, you kept saying ‘Mom’ because you didn’t know my name. I didn’t know enough English to realize that they had been calling for me over the intercom the whole time. I still don’t.”

You were four then, this being right after your family had immigrated. You don’t remember the incident firsthand, but you like hearing the story of how your mother came back for you. You remember how grocery runs were always a group activity in your household, how there would be months of only traveling between school and Walmart and home. Little did you know that those days would turn out to be the good times, that you would fall asleep wishing that you were small and in the back seat again, listening to your parents bicker on the way to Walmart.

Before your mother ends the call, she asks you to pick up some vitamins because they’re cheaper there. You let her go and you return to your shopping list. You pick up boxed wine. Handles of vodka and six-packs of beer and two bottles of the cheapest champagne. Frozen mini pizzas and mini corn dogs and mini quiches. Chocolate peanut butter cups because they are your best friend’s favorite. With each addition, your cart gains momentum.

In the pharmacy section, the lightness of your nostalgia begins to churn into a familiar anxiety. Walmart is both a living monument of your boring rural childhood and the crux of many evils: the costs simply don’t add up. Before you lost your scholarship and dropped out of college, you sat in lectures with rapt desperation, hanging onto every word on Marxism and congealed labor and the co-optation of race and borders and citizenship. You cared about being politically correct then, thought policies would save you, thought the distinctions between labels like “illegal” (bad) and “undocumented” (inaccurate) and “illegalized” (bingo) mattered, and you took great care to categorize yourself properly. You don’t think about those words anymore; they don’t have any sway over you when you’re about to quit America.

Somewhere between the fish oil and melatonin aisles, your sentimentality gets the better of you, so you briefly abandon your cart to go on a pharmacy ride detour. You step into a Dr. Scholls’s orthotics machine. You shove an arm down a blood pressure monitor machine. As the inflatable cuff tightens around your left bicep, you marvel at how all the Walmarts have the same identical layout. You hate Walmart because you should — you’ve held onto your anti-capitalist principles, after all — but you love the familiarity of this place, the way all Walmart entrances begin near the produce and end with clothing and plastic jewelry. Once, your best friend called from Los Angeles to complain about how it took her three trips to buy toilet paper, a tube of tomato paste, and a pillow. Here, it’s all in the same place. If there was a heaven, you think, it would probably look a lot like Walmart: everyone you love and everything you need in one place, within arm’s reach.

Before you check out, you grab a headlight and twenty cans of lighter fluid.

Fourth, you throw a pity party.

After giving away the few furniture items and plants you possess, you’ll guilt the recipients of your redistributed inventory to gather at your place in lieu of payment. You take three shots of tequila before anyone shows up because that’s when you’re the most fun.This small, throat-burning sacrifice is necessary preparation because you are the host, the mood-setter, the cause for this going-away celebration. If you look like you’re having a bad time, everyone will follow suit and then you will have accomplished the truly unforgivable: thrown a shitty party and wasted everyone’s time. You want to go out in a drunken splendor, want everyone to kiss and cry and promise things they can actually deliver, like calling their grandparents or finally opening a retirement account.

But of course, you overdo it. Two hours later, you’re the only person who isn’t sober. Half your friends are cursing the government and the other half are slouched against the wall, mumbling condolences, trying to be polite and non-partisan. Everyone’s drinks are full and their plates are sparse. The vibes are rancid. Agitated, you scramble up the last chair remaining in your studio.

“Evening, comrades! Thank you for coming. I expected you all to pregame for this but no matter,” you slur. You gesture with your drink and start rambling. In the periphery, your best friend’s face twists with exasperation and you smirk because there’s nothing you love more than annoying her with your theatrics.

“I know,” you continue. “But here’s the thing! The motherland will not be so terrible. Countries with universal healthcare and affordable public schools do indeed have their pitfalls! The taxes will be higher and the salaries will be lower, yes. But life isn’t all about financial gain, friends. It will not be so —” (you burp) “— awful.”

“Bitch, shut up,” your best friend shouts. “We’re sad because we’ll miss you!”

“I’m not done,” you shout back. “A toast! I want to make a toast!”

You make serial killer eyes at everyone in the room until they reluctantly hold up their drinks. “I hate this country so much,” you say, meaning every word. “And I love you all so much,” you add, holding back messy drunk girl tears. You continue.

“This is actually a happy occasion. Imagine: I’m finally leaving a super terrible, toxic relationship with a power-trippy maniac who threatens to kick me out every day. Except instead of a person, it’s a nation-state.”

“To leaving nation-state fuckers behind,” your best friend hollers, and you scream “Yes, exactly!” and chug your assent. You keep pouring and drinking until everyone gives in and gets drunk-sad and hysterical-happy with you.

You’ll wish that everyone could stay in this room forever, but of course they won’t. They can’t — eventually they kiss your forehead and collect their things from the pile by the door and leave for their own beds, one by one. When you finally lift your head, it’s two in the morning and you’re on the floor, curled under a coat that’s not yours. Your best friend has cleaned up all the red cups and paper plates on your behalf, and she is now mopping the sticky kitchen floor. The sweet smell of her perfume on her winter coat makes you feel even more drunk. If she was dealt your cards, she could endure it, you think. Unlike you, she carries herself with the self-assurance of someone who knows they belong to themselves. You make a disgruntled sound and she slides next to you, her face upside down. Your best friend, your kinder and hotter and smarter half, the one friend who didn’t abandon you after getting married. You say this out loud.

“Marriage doesn’t mean I have to renounce friendships, moron,” she says. She sighs and closes her eyes. “What are you going to do over there?”

“Hang out with Mom and Dad. Teach English. Get paid to write rich kids’ college essays. Save enough money to get a boob job and then marry rich because I won’t have any friends over there so I might as well. Profit.”

Your friend rolls her eyes. “No, really.”

“Dunno. Just going to live,” you say, drifting back to sleep.

You tried living here but you are finally ready to admit to yourself that it has all become too difficult. Once, you explained to your friend what Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals really meant: the government was just stalling, it was never meant to solve any part of your predicament. But all the while, you were stalling too. The thought of asking your friend to care for you felt intolerable, loathsome even, and instead you continued to love your friend in secret until that too became too lonesome. It whittled down your self-respect, hardened you in ways that made you look ugly even to yourself.

Even undeserving immigrants like you should get to rest every now and then.

Finally, you drive west.

At long last, you are ready to take care of business. You’ll drive through the night, playing yacht rock and licking Hot Cheetos powder off your fingers. When the fog of sleep creeps closer, drive faster and recite the facts from the naturalization test to stay awake. Tax Day is April 15. The national anthem is “The Star Spangled Banner.” There are twenty-seven amendments to the Constitution. Somewhere in the American heartland, there is an abandoned factory devoid of windows and warmth.

And that factory is special to you. It is a place that once produced seat belts and stamped all their packages with a Made In America seal until an ICE raid shut it down. The town where those factory workers once lived shrunk in real life and expanded in the space between your ribs until it became the ghost town it is now, and you became another restless apparition haunting it. At least, that’s what you’ll tell yourself as you drive around your hometown for the first time in years. You turn off the music and the GPS. The town’s sole grocery store, a place where your parents could never find the right vegetables or spices, has aged poorly even in the dark. You drive past the four-block stretch that makes up town, past the sunflower patches and cornfields, and make a left on a gravel road. You park outside the factory your parents toiled in for twelve years. Turn off the car lights. Step out and stretch under the moon.

You stand for a moment, letting your eyes adjust before scanning the empty space in front of what used to be a door. Your parents would eat lunch and smoke and mingle with their fellow immigrant coworkers by the picnic table a few yards away. They stayed in this town and worked in this factory even after you left for school. You suggested that they move to the city too, that there was no reason for them to stay behind, but they always resisted. They liked the countryside. They said it was peaceful. And truthfully, you liked the distance. You began to appreciate the freedom of living in a real city, far from your parents’ anxieties and expectations. Who could blame you? How could you not regret leaving them when they would soon be taken?

You study the lifeless building made of wood and steel. For years, you felt it was unfair that this structure remained standing even after all the people who once brought it to life were shipped off. It shouldn’t have surprised you. The only thing sacred in this country is property after all — but looking at the building still makes your insides burn. You click on the headlamp, take out the box of lighter fluid from the trunk and approach with a determined stride. You run your hands over the windowless siding and listen for raccoons, skunks, robins. Animals you won’t see for a long time.

You don’t believe in justice. Not really, not anymore. But you came here for a reason. You spray the walls of the old factory in fuel.

“I know this is pointless,” you say to the building, to the moon that hangs low and bright, to no one nearby. You gather sticks and wood scraps to make a trail leading several feet away from the building. Douse the path with lighter fluid.

“It’s not your fault or my parents’ fault or any one thing,” you say.

“It’s just. Every day they used to be so scared of living and working here. Every single day. They were afraid of everything — of getting injured, of me getting sick, of not being able to see me, see each other. Afterward, they told me they should have left sooner. Shouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

You walk back to the far edge of the trail of flammable debris.

“I miss them,” you confess. “Sometimes I think I might die from missing them. If I stay here, I won’t even be a person anymore.”

You take a step back. Light a match. Above you, the faint glow of morning peaks on the horizon. Below you, a tiny flame crawls toward your hands. You imagine the matchstick growing into a great fire, chasing you like a police siren, telling you to go.

Goeun Park is a writer born in Busan and raised in Northern Minnesota. They are a 2023 Periplus Fellow.

Edited by Briana Gwin and Jules Chung.

The featured artwork was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

Holy Land, Holy Life

Meg Sykes — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:00:52 +0000

On October 10th, 2023, I rediscover a keffiyeh — a traditional Palestinian scarf — while unpacking boxes in my new apartment in Seattle. Khadijah*, the mother of my childhood friend Leila, gave it to me during my last trip to their home in Jerusalem. Between headlines bombarding me from my phone, I recall the taste of maqluba, decadent lamb mixed with cardamom-kissed rice, which Leila’s mother has fed me for decades: first, in the perceived safety of the US, and then over a decade later, on a gold-lined tablecloth in the Muslim Quarter of East Jerusalem.

Leila and I had clicked on the first day of kindergarten in a suburb of Seattle, marveling over mancala beads. Our friendship continued to blossom through basketball practices and school dances until ICE agents showed up on her doorstep one day in high school, forcing her family to relocate to their ancestral homeland. The black and white keffiyeh still smells faintly of cloves and jasmine. Wrapped in my memories of the Holy Land, I pray Leila’s home will be spared from the latest waves of bombing. In every image of a wounded Palestinian child, I see the faces of Leila’s two young children staring back at me.

My new apartment is quiet, but the footage from Gaza is deafening. It is as if my phone is screaming at me — videos of mothers wailing for their children while bombs fire behind them, images of bloodied children, human limbs under rubble, promises of “severe retaliation” from Israel’s right-wing government officials. With each scroll, the images become more haunting.

Did you see the footage? A message from one of my Orthodox Jewish friends pops up on Instagram. She is referring to videos of Israeli Jews kidnapped by Hamas. Yes. I’ve seen them.

I’ve also seen footage of Israeli settlers kidnapping a teenager on his way to a mosque in East Jerusalem¹ before burning him alive, bombs splaying a preschool’s alphabet magnets into plastic shards, Palestinian hospitals leveled in seconds.² I’ve seen footage of peace treaty promises broken by Israeli settlers in 1967,³ 2000, and 2014, and of defenseless siblings throwing rocks at Israeli Defense Force (IDF) guns, keffiyehs hiding everything but their eyes. I’ve heard Israel’s so-called reasoning — a sacred book, an imaginary deed, a false claim that my ancestors and descendants have a right to kill. But I’ve also seen the spirit of survival in Leila’s children: proof that her ancestors and descendants have a right to live.

In late 2019, the IDF started a ground assault in the West Bank while Khadijah’s niece went into labor. She rushed to the hospital, two Israeli checkpoints in her path. Israeli-operated checkpoints are similar to metal cages, meant to control and repress freedom of movement for Palestinians. An IDF soldier questioned her extensively as her contractions became shorter and shorter. He realized she was in labor, smirked to his buddies, and forbade her from leaving. Her baby died there inside her, as she lay surrounded by the checkpoint’s metal bars. This didn’t make American news.

In 1907, Zionist leader Chaim Weissman visited Palestine for the first time to stake out the land for a Jewish state, claiming “The British told us that there are some hundred thousand Kushim [a Hebrew term for a dark-skinned person] and for those there is no value.”⁴

Ten years later, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, promising a “national home for Jews” on Palestinian land.⁵ This wasn’t an act of benevolence by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour — he was no fan of the Jewish people.⁶ In fact, he previously passed the Aliens Act of 1905, primarily aimed at restricting Jewish immigration to Great Britain. As Jews fled violent anti-semitism across Europe, Balfour reasoned supporting a Jewish nation would keep Jews out of Great Britain, and would give Britain geopolitical control of Palestine as a strategic stronghold during World War I.⁷ It was a win-win for the vocal white supremacist anti-semite.⁸

The idea of “Zionism” — the term for Jewish nationalism — only emerged in the late 1800s.⁹ Many Jews were against it, arguing that nationalism leads to violence and bigotry, and that Jews should instead fight for the safety of Jewish people across the diaspora¹⁰. Even Albert Einstein “acknowledged the Arab peoples living in Palestine as ‘kinfolk,’ and feared that any attempt to create a Jewish state on Arab land would lead to decades of hostility.”¹¹ Judaism, as a religion, has roots dating back over three thousand years. Before British colonization, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in relative peace in the Ottoman-controlled region, and Muslims and Christian Arabs made up 94 percent of the population. Part of Zionism’s argument justifies colonization in Palestine by stating Jews have a two-thousand-year-old connection to the Holy Land, ignoring the connections Muslims and Christians also have there. David Ben-Gurion, who later served as Israel’s Prime Minister, told former US Secretary of War Patrick Hurley about Zionists’ plans in 1943. Hurley then extended a warning to President Roosevelt, summarizing Zionist goals as “expanding a sovereign Jewish state, eventually transferring the Arab population from Palestine to Iraq, and establishing Jewish leadership for the entire Middle East in the fields of economic development and control.” The blueprint for Zionist imperialism was never a secret.

When Palestinians began protesting colonization in 1917, leaders of the strike were imprisoned, exiled, and killed.¹² Murders don’t justify murders, but violent occupation does justify resistance; land grabs necessitate questions. When the screams of the martyred and massacred are ignored, extremists emerge. Put another way, John F. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

My grandfather was the right hue of refugee. He fled the Holocaust from Vienna in 1938, and though he experienced his fair share of financial struggles, it wasn’t more than a decade before he was folded into white middle-class US citizenship. As I reflect on his trajectory to assimilation, a message comes in from Leila on WhatsApp, asking me where her family can flee. I search frantically for an answer, landing on a United Nations Resettlement website that proves useless — when searched, “Palestine” yields No Results Found. Erased from maps and effectively scrubbed from the global lexicon. The United Nations Resettlement landing page for Israel does not list the word “Palestinian” even once. Over seven million Palestinians have been forcibly removed from their homelands by the Israeli government and scattered across the globe. The news callously refers to them as “terrorists,” when they bother to mention them at all. But who are the real terrorists, and who are the refugees?

I was an uninformed twenty-two-year-old when my feet first touched ground in the Holy Land as a participant in Taglit-Birthright: an Israeli government–funded program that grants young Jews a free ten-day trip to Israel. Raised only culturally Jewish, I was not steeped in calls for a passionate allegiance to the state of Israel like some of my peers. My family rarely attended synagogue, and the most we talked about Israel was ceremoniously ending our Passover seder by chanting L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim, meaning “next year in Jerusalem” in Hebrew.

As a kid, I’d known Jerusalem only as the faraway place mentioned in the Torah — not some bustling historic site for Muslims, Christians, and Jews that Zionists intended to capture through violence and land theft. My understanding of Jews’ connection to Jerusalem was one of spiritual Zionism, not political Zionism. Unlike many other young American Jews, I did not attend any Jewish Day School, which often weaved Zionist messaging into teachings of Judaism by urging their pupils to protect the state of Israel at all costs, necessitating the state’s existence with fears of Jewish safety. I did, however, receive extensive history lessons about the Holocaust, and the general refrain at seders emphasized the persecution of Jews throughout history, along with the dangers of anti-semitism. I was told horror stories of the concentration camps my ancestors were murdered in, creating a cloud of paranoia that consistently hovered over my Jewish identity. And while I wasn’t indoctrinated enough to buy into Zionism fully, it would still take years of unlearning Zionist messaging to understand how disparate the settler colonial project of Israel is from the teachings of Judaism, which values life and social justice. Most synagogues — and public schools, like mine — completely erased Palestinians from Israel’s history. For these reasons, I remained blissfully unaware of Palestinian history and the realities of military occupation for years.

When I was in my early twenties, my cousins and brother had attended Birthright before me, and had spoken highly of the free trip, so I decided to attend with a plan to visit Leila and her family afterward in East Jerusalem. During the ten-day program, I was whisked from Holocaust memorial to Zionist monument along with a group of other Birthright participants. Our tour guides often spoke like fast-talking real estate agents, relaying a clear message at every opportune moment: “You belong here, they don’t belong here, you belong here…” And we were even handed maps which seemed to only affirm this one-sided vision: blank spaces where Gaza and the West Bank should have been.

One night, my Birthright cohort was corralled into a giant sports arena in Tel Aviv for a “Mega Event.”¹³ Over five thousand young Jews from around the world were handed blue and white noise makers and cocktails upon entering the rave-like arena.

“This is the one night on the trip you’re allowed to drink alcohol, so bottoms up!” My tour guide beamed, strobe lights flashing across her face.

A hype man took the mic, reminding us that we were the “chosen people” before leading a chant that translates to “long live Israel.” He then invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to the stage, who urged us to “make aliyah,” meaning “rise” or “return” to Israel.

“The Holocaust killed one-third of our ancestors, and we need you to help us repopulate the world with Jews,” Netanyahu began, before encouraging all of us in the crowd to go home and “spread the truth” about Israel — namely, that this was our rightful land, and that despite what ignorant critics preached, Arabs had full rights in this country just like anyone else. “Then come back to Israel, make your family here, and help protect our sacred state from the Jewish-hating terrorists. We need you,” he urged.

Arabs have full rights in this country?

In exchange for dedicating our lives to promoting and defending our state’s interests, Netanyahu assured us that they would pay for our Hebrew classes, our flights to and from our promised land, and whatever employment arrangements would be necessary upon arrival. They’d even paired us with IDF soldiers to help ease us into the cause; the assumptive heteronormative pairings apparently had been made without regard for our true gender identities or sexual preferences. At Netanyahu’s closing words, the crowd erupted with applause. I looked around anxiously, hoping to find anyone else who shared my suspicions about the ulterior motives of this program. I’d found it odd and deeply uncomfortable that the Prime Minister of Israel had taken time out of his day to encourage young American Jews to fornicate. But as I scanned the crowd on either side of me, all I saw were admiring faces gazing up at Bibi. I frantically looked for an exit. An alarm had sounded somewhere within my body as memories of childhood playdates with Leila flooded my mind. Surely, they could not be the “terrorists” Netanyahu claimed were attacking us?

While I remained unaware of the details of colonization and apartheid in Israel, an uncomfortable dread had already begun reverberating throughout my body while listening to Netanyahu’s speech. The longer I stood in the crowd of young people boisterously cheering him on, the more skeptical I became of his words and the cult-like chants they elicited from the crowd. Many of us had been taught that Israel was our rightful homeland since birth, and some among us would even grow up to join the IDF in order to help “protect our land” from “violent Arabs.”

As IDF soldiers continued to pair off with participants with alcoholic beverages in hand, I threw my cocktail in the trash. Something about the gun-toting soldiers and the urging of a militarized leader to reproduce turned me off. Netanyahu’s motives continued to reveal themselves as I learned more about the importance of sustaining a Jewish demographic majority in Israel. Netanyahu needed us to “repopulate the world with Jews” because in Israel, Jewish babies grow up into IDF soldiers, thanks to a mandatory draft. Zionist indoctrination is critical for Israeli youth to buy into militarized occupation; if they refuse to serve in the military, they face jail time. At the end of our trip, we would be given dozens of pamphlets and brochures for “quick and easy ways to make aliyah” — to become an Israeli citizen — complete with Jewish dating site info and IDF application instructions.

As alienating as my Birthright experience turned out to be, I was at least grateful to make the acquaintance of a single fellow cohort member who shared my objections and criticism. After the Mega Event had finally ended and we all cleared out of the stadium, I collapsed into the seat next to her on the bus back to the kibbutz.

“I have a new trip slogan,” she smirked. “Taglit-Birthright: Because Jewish soldiers don’t make themselves.”

If I had been eager to branch off on my own at the beginning of my trip, the propaganda tour had only exacerbated my desire to depart from the Birthright group. I gratefully took advantage of the program’s option to postpone my flight home. I’m pretty sure visiting a Palestinian in East Jerusalem wasn’t what Birthright officials had in mind, but I was eager to see my childhood friend: I hadn’t seen her or her family in over five years. Memories of her going-away party swam in my mind as I boarded a train toward Shu’afat, East Jerusalem.

Three hours later, I finally arrived, and was greeted at the station by squeals from Leila and hugs from her younger brother.

“I can’t believe how grown up you are!” Khadijah beamed as she embraced me. Being in their family’s presence instantly calmed my nerves and grounded me.

“Oh, you two used to be so cute together in kindergarten — remember that? You sang ‘What a Wonderful World.’”

I smiled at the memory of Leila and I singing off-key at just five years old. The lyrics — written by a Jewish songwriter in the sixties — resurfaced at the mention of the memory:“I see friends shaking hands, saying, “How do you do?” They're really saying, “I love you.”

“You know I teach kindergarten here now?” Khadijah continued. “It’s so difficult to find work with our ID cards, and I don’t like to travel far.¹⁴ It seems every other week there’s a bombing on a bus, or another trigger-happy IDF soldier.”

I nodded solemnly.

“That separation wall,” she continued, “is one wall and two prisons. The Israelis live in fear, and we Palestinians live in fear — fear of the other. But I have hope. One day, peace will be brought upon this land once again. What do your people say? Shalom? Peace? One day…” Khadijah said, bowing her head in prayer. Inshallah, God Willing, I did the same.

Even with the picture Khadijah had painted for me of two peoples living in fear of each other from opposite sides of the same wall, I had yet to fully grasp the realities of the Palestinian experience under occupation.

During the month I spent in East Jerusalem, I saw IDF soldiers clutching American-made guns at every corner. I heard multiple firsthand accounts of IDF soldiers imprisoning Palestinians without cause, and witnessed many of the severe restrictions imposed on Palestinian movement, political organization, and access to means of livelihood by the Israeli government. I broke bread with Leila’s cousins, whose house was recently demolished by Israeli soldiers because they didn’t have an Israeli government–issued building permit — despite the home being on Palestinian land that her cousins owned. I joined a tour of Hebron with Breaking the Silence, a group of former IDF soldiers who speak out about atrocities committed by soldiers in the West Bank, and witnessed Israeli settlers throwing trash on Palestinian homes. I met a Jewish Israeli of Arab descent who described the separate criminal legal systems for Palestinians and Israelis, and lamented about rampant racism and discrimination toward Jews of Arab descent in Israel.¹⁵ Even seemingly insidious instances stuck with me, like when I witnessed a Palestinian woman’s tatreez materials — a form of traditional Palestinian embroidery — destroyed by IDF soldiers at a checkpoint, or when an Israeli woman on a bus told me her grandparents “settled” in a home in Jaffa that still had the former (Palestinian) inhabitants’ furniture in it. Netanyahu’s mendacious words kept ringing in my head: Arabs have full rights in this country…

A few weeks into my stay in Shu’afat, Leila and I decided to take a weekend trip to Tel Aviv with her brother, Mo. Although Tel Aviv is about forty-four miles from East Jerusalem and should have been an hour’s drive, the numerous checkpoints turned it into a five-hour trek.

Famished, we found a trendy restaurant-lounge on the Mediterranean boardwalk. Leila and I flashed our IDs and blue US passports and walked in. But Mo held an Israeli-issued blue ID card, which should have granted him the ability to move freely in Tel Aviv.¹⁶ The waiter glanced from Mo’s ID to his expectant face — the face of a Palestinian man, whose identity this Israeli waiter was surely socialized to hate — and spat dismissively in Hebrew, barring him from the restaurant. Mo shrugged it off, apparently used to state-sanctioned discrimination.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m obviously just too sexy for that place,” he winked. But I saw the strain behind his eyes, exacerbated by years of fighting for his right to exist in his ancestors’ homeland.

We settled for a shawarma restaurant further away from the Mediterranean boardwalk, where Mo and Leila filled in the gaps of my ignorance.

“Look, let me explain what it’s really like. We have these cards with different colors on them that tell us where we can live, work, or go to school,” Leila said.

“And even though Mo has the blue card, Israelis hold all the power. Once, he was waiting at a checkpoint trying to get home from university, and the fucking Israelis took him to the interrogation room and beat him. He had a black eye for a week. And he never said shit to them! He’s lucky, though. Our cousin Ghassan is jailed and still doesn’t have a trial date. We don’t even know why he was locked up.” Her voice turned from fire to water, rage giving way to despair.

“Anyone who tries to fight back, they throw in jail,” Mo adds. “Anyone who wants a shred of respect, anyone who wants to protect their family’s land from Israeli settlers, they murder. I don’t even blame the extremists — most of their families were executed over the years by IDF soldiers. I mean, how would you feel? What would you do? We’ve been speaking out for decades, doing nonviolent protests, hosting peace talks between Arabs and Israelis. But suicide bombings make better headlines I guess, and then they can justify violence against us as ‘defense.’ Like they’re not suffocating us daily.”

My heart squeezed as I took in my childhood friends’ reality living in an apartheid state. How does oppressing others keep Jews safe, like I had been implicitly taught during Birthright? Why didn’t I learn about Israel’s illegal occupation in school, or from Jewish elders? My head pulsed with questions. The betrayal, confusion, and anger of witnessing my religion wielded as a tool of oppression and violence coursed through my veins. The Jewish values I connected to most as a child — tikkun olam (repairing the world), pikuach nefesh (sanctity of all human life), and tzedek (justice) — were devastatingly absent in the state of Israel. Since that summer day on the Tel Aviv boardwalk, my commitment to anti-Zionism would only intensify the more I learned about the Israeli occupation.

Israel is the largest recipient of cumulative US foreign assistance since World War II, racking up more than one hundred and sixty billion dollars of US aid.¹⁷ Bearing witness to repeated acts of violent settler colonialism over the years has cemented in me a desire to learn real history, beyond what Western media sells the global north. I’ve learned that the US provides more than 80 percent of Israel’s total military purchases,¹⁸ that stocks of US weapons manufacturers boom during wartime.¹⁹ And I’ve learned that federal “legislation mandates that the US government help Israel maintain force superiority — or its “qualitative military edge” — over other Middle Eastern nations,” underscoring the US’s allegiance to Israel as a military stronghold in the oil-rich region.²⁰ Analysts say the total damage of explosives Israel has dropped on Gaza in October 2023 alone is equivalent to two nuclear bombs.²¹

Two nuclear bombs. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu beams unapologetically whenever he appears on television, claiming he was “inspired by the US, by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

I stop sleeping.

These days, when I can get through to Leila on WhatsApp, she tells me she’s running out of explanations for her three-year-old son. It is 2024 — seventy-six years after the Nakba and still, no Palestinian is safe. Leila writes: The wailing from the mosque won’t stop. Day and night, people are mourning their family members. Between that and the noise from the blasts, he’s constantly asking questions. What can I tell him?

A school textbook from 1938 reveals what Khadijah’s mother and other Palestinian elementary school children had been learning at the time. The book depicts Palestine as bordering Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and the Mediterranean Sea. Within ten years, all this would change.

British colonial rule attempted to force Palestinians off their land by fear and force throughout the early 1900s.²² They burned hundreds of olive trees, rounded men up and made them walk on burning coal, tortured prisoners, indiscriminately rationed food supplies, and demolished homes.²³

In 1936, Palestinians staged a six-month-long revolt against Britain’s promise to “establish a Jewish national home” on Palestinian land. Protestors wore keffiyehs to avoid identification and arrest, and when British Mandate authorities banned them, all Palestinians started donning the scarf in solidarity to make it harder to identify the activists.

In response, British forces banned all Palestinians from owning weapons while handing out guns and equipping special Jewish forces to act as protective militia for Jewish settlements and their inhabitants, who encroached on Palestinian land.²⁴ They raided Palestinian villages to kill anyone found harboring revolutionaries, not unlike the US “slave patrols” that were implemented to kill anyone harboring enslaved people or any person suspected of planning a revolt.

As Leila’s ancestors were being kicked out of their living room by British troops in 1938, my Ashkenazi Jewish grandfather was sneaking out of his. He was twenty-one then, and news of Hitler’s imminent arrival in Austria forced him to choose whether to leave his ailing grandmother and mother behind or to stay and die by their side. His family had lived in Vienna for generations; this branch of my family tree is indigenous to Austria. After he fled, his aunt sponsored his arrival to the United States, where he quickly joined the US military. Grandpa Kurt purchased a home in the suburbs made possible with the money he received through the GI Bill, which was often denied to soldiers of color. He settled his family in a quiet neighborhood, and eventually earned enough money for his sons to enroll in the universities of their choosing.

I share this nuanced history not to invalidate my grandfather’s suffering, nor the fact that many branches of my family tree were gassed to death by anti-Semitism. But so much of the Zionist appropriation of Jewish trauma and the memory of the Holocaust are misused to oppress Palestinians, who were nowhere near the gas chambers our ancestors perished in. Enacting genocide is not a trauma response, but trauma got us here; we were stripped of our dignity, belonging, agency, and safety, and then displaced another group of human beings and subjected them to the same fate. What place can misplaced vengeance possibly have in securing justice? How can Jews ever heal while children are slaughtered in our name?

The Israeli government spends millions on a “Brand Israel” campaign, spreading pro-Israel propaganda for the support of American Jews, and claiming that the Nakba never even happened in the first place.²⁵ Allegedly, its Palestinian victims were the original perpetrators of aggression against the Jewish population, and the Zionist/Israeli forces were only responding in self-defense.²⁶ But all these claims are, of course, false. The initial perpetrator was British-backed mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Brand Israel, I learn, is likely why none of my Jewish elders educated me about the Nakba, an Arab word that means “catastrophe.” My elders were almost certainly shielded from the truth of Jewish colonization. The racist propaganda campaign, along with hasbara, a Hebrew word that means "explaining,” describe the Israeli government’s efforts to sway public opinion abroad.²⁷ The disinformation campaign has only surged in the last six months, peddling lies about “forty beheaded Israeli babies” and “terrorist control centers in hospitals.” Both have since been debunked.

This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle, Netanyahu tweets.

It is 1974, and Kurt’s son — my father — is submitting college applications from Tacoma, WA. Halfway across the world, Khadijah and her siblings are attending mass funerals of families and friends. My father’s synagogue preaches about Jewish safety and allegiance to Israel, but says nothing of the Palestinians already inhabiting the land. My father’s rabbi did not mention this — effectively erasing Palestinian existence from Jewish collective memory. From 1967 to 1987, the Israeli military arrested and detained more than half a million Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Khadijah’s auntie was one of one thousand, five hundred and sixty people whose homes were demolished by Israeli forces. There was no quiet neighborhood left for her to resettle in.

In 1948, the myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land” solidified the creation of Israel. But the land was, of course, not “without a people”; over seven hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced and dispossessed to found Israel. The determination of whose lives matter, whose lives “have value,” hinges upon what serves the violent agenda of settler colonialism.

Over the past seventy-five years, Israeli forces have bombed entire neighborhoods, leveling hospitals and mosques in the name of “defense” on land they occupy, all while flagrantly breaking international law. Zionists have now seized some 78 percent of historic Palestine and counting, and keffiyehs drape over hundreds of thousands of displaced peoples’ shoulders.²⁸ The keffiyeh has meant “resistance” for as long as resistance has been required.

From October 2023 to March 2024, IDF soldiers have kidnapped over seven thousand Palestinians in the West Bank, most of whom were lured into capture with promises of work — the very same tactic used on Jews by Nazi Germany.²⁹ Zionist settlers post plans for an Israeli coastal city in current-day Gaza, building a Holy Land for their children on the mass graves of other children.

How many keffiyehs will be buried beneath the rubble?

In the Seattle suburbs in the late 1990s, Leila’s brothers were called “terrorists” for wearing keffiyehs by our elementary school classmates. Those bullies are grown up now, some of them writing laws on foreign policy, others passing down the same hateful rhetoric to their own children. I imagine a group of white politicians scheming to implicate an enemy after the towers fell, rolling out Islamophobia with vigor. I know that the shaping of propaganda is more nuanced than the policies that come out of a room full of white men asserting their dominance, but I’m a writer and work best with images.

Here’s an image: an elderly man is grilling meat in his backyard when he gets news of his son’s death.

And another: a young freedom fighter drops out of school to protect his family.

Yet another: a toddler digs up grenade shrapnel in a sandbox.

Who did you imagine as you read those descriptions: an Israeli or a Palestinian?

Memories of three different clouds of smoke from October 31, 2023 are seared into my brain. In the first memory, my two-year-old niece runs through a smoke machine on Halloween alongside neighborhood kids donning fake blood and plastic swords. In the second, images of white phosphorus smoke rain down on Gaza’s neighborhoods, burning children’s flesh to the bone. In the third, an image posted by an Israeli settler of a missile absorbed by the Iron Dome — a US-funded Israeli air defense system with a three-million-dollar price tag — results in a tiny tuft of smoke against a clear blue sky.

I see skies of blue, and clouds of white. The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world...

The year is now 2024, and an active genocide is in progress. Violence strikes hardest in the night. We wake to news of more and more grave sites until websites fail to load in Gaza; the electricity and internet are regularly intercepted by the Israeli government to silence the screams of their victims. Since the IDF has murdered over one hundred Palestinian journalists to date in the last six months,³⁰ denies entry to foreign journalists without IDF-approved talking points,³¹ and recently passed a law to ban Al Jazeera media from reporting in Israel,³² the burden falls on Gazans on the ground to share the carnage of their neighbors via social media, demanding the world intervene.

If a mother cries in a dead zone, does the world still hear her?

When an Arab mother screams over her dead children, who replies?

Do they ask first for her papers?

“We are living as refugees in our own homeland,” a Palestinian activist pleads to the masses in an online recording. “Do not ask me if Hamas has Israeli hostages while Israel has the whole country hostage. The West loaded IDF soldiers’ weapons with US taxes from your paychecks. The blood of babies starved to death is on your hands.”

I hear babies cry, I watch them grow. They'll learn much more than I'll ever know. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world…

The silence hurts more than the bombs, Leila writes in another WhatsApp message. No one is coming for us. Kayla, tell me — who is coming for us?

I do not know who is coming, so I do not say. Instead, I do my best to reassure her of what I do know: that the world is watching, and solidarity movements are pulsing and igniting across the globe — in South Africa, San Francisco, Seoul, and elsewhere. I send photos of anti-Zionist Jews protesting in Seattle, the keffiyeh her mother gifted me wrapped around my shoulders as we continue demanding a ceasefire from our corrupt leaders. I tell her we are rallying for a global unlearning, a rewriting of whitewashed history — that we are begging for humanity not to look away. And when some among us inevitably do, as death tolls are recounted like scores of a soccer match, and “self-care” in the West becomes a euphemism for tuning out airstrikes in the Middle East, and there is nothing left to do but scream or be silent, our voices will ring out even louder in a chorus, pleading atonement for the blood-stained hands of humanity.

Back in my living room in Seattle, I wrap the keffiyeh around my shoulders, inhaling the faint smells of East Jerusalem while praying for the safety of Leila, Khadijah, Mo, and all Palestinians across the globe. I continue unpacking boxes, and rediscover a binder of photos and documents from my Jewish grandfather. I pick up a tattered newspaper article from 1939, a year after my grandfather fled bigotry and violence to seek asylum in the US. The caption reads: Kurt Blau, the other refugee, was born in Vienna, but resided in an emigrant camp in Switzerland for a year prior to coming to this country.

I then find a letter my grandfather wrote to his relatives while in the camp, lamenting about inhumane living conditions. We wake up hungry, and there are more than two hundred people sleeping on the floor of a single room. Nearly all are sick from the damp of the soil we sleep on…he writes. My mind begins to flood with recent images of malnourished Palestinians fleeing racist violence by foot, forced from one refugee camp to another. Images of starving children in Auschwitz blend into present-day images of starving children in Rafah. Making refugees of others will never keep Jews safe. Man-made famine, borders, guns, walls, and mass graves will only sever us from any chance at peace, from our ancient teachings of Judaism, from our humanity.

There is a prayer we recite during Yom Kippur called “ashamnu,” which translates to “we have been guilty.” We repent collectively, because when one Jew has done wrong, the whole community must take accountability. For every IDF soldier who pulled a trigger, there are

millions of Jewish bystanders remaining silent as our ancient religion is hijacked by a century-old nationalist agenda calling for the murder of innocent families. The history of Jewish suffering — of being discriminated against for our identity — cannot be used to justify dehumanizing and slaughtering another people for theirs. Growing up, I was taught the most Jewish thing you can do is to ask questions, to think critically and deeply, and to speak out against injustices.³³ To that end, it is in honor of my Jewish heritage — not in spite of it — that I support Palestinian life.³⁴

I imagine my grandfather reciting ashamnu during Yom Kippur in 1939, the year he sought asylum in the US. He was likely celebrating alone in army barracks in the Midwest, mourning his forced separation from his loved ones. What did he repent for? Did he imagine the future of his lineage, the safety of his descendents? This Yom Kippur, eighty-five years after my grandfather fled genocidal powers and seventy-six years after Palestinians were forcefully exiled from their homes, what will I repent for? I think of Leila’s son and my niece, both just three years old. I climb up our respective family trees over the past three generations, grieving the shared experiences of banishment, discrimination, and persecution. I know violence flourishes amidst silence, so I speak up, like Leila asked me to, and urge others to do the same. I dig underneath the clouds of anguish and despair, praying for a seed of solidarity and hope, for a righting of our collective wrongs, so that one day, a Muslim Palestinian and an Ashkenazi Jew can sing “What a Wonderful World” in the same kindergarten class, and mean it.

*Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.

Erlanger, Steven. “2 Israelis Sentenced in 2014 Murder of Palestinian Teenager.” The New York Times. 4 February 2016.
Turfah, Mary. “Israel Has Created a Medical Apocalypse in Gaza.” The Nation. 20 February 2024. v
Six-Day War. Encyclopedia Britannica. 13 February 2024.
Masala, Nur. Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return, edited by Naseer Aruri [p.37]. 2001.
“Balfour Declaration: Text of the Declaration.” Jewish Virtual Library. 2 November 1917.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. 2020.
Khalidi, Rashid. British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914: St. Antony's Middle East monographs. Ithaca Press. 1980.
Munayyer, Yousef. “It’s time to admit that Arthur Balfour was a white supremacist — and an anti-Semite, too.” The Forward. 1 November 2017.
Eichler, William. “Herzl’s Troubled Dream: The Origins of Zionism.” History Today. 6 June 2023.
Greenstein, Tony. “Israel’s Holocaust trauma is a myth.” Electronic Intifada. 29 Mach. 2024.
Falk, Dan. “One Hundred Years Ago, Einstein Was Given a Hero’s Welcome by America’s Jews.” Smithsonian Magazine. 2 April 2021.
Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1943, The Near East and Africa, Volume IV. Brigadier General Patrick J. Hurley, Personal Representative of President Roosevelt. US Department of State, Office of the Historian.
Damen, Rawan. Al Nakba: the History of Palestine Since 1799 — Palestine Remix. Al Jazeera. 2013.
“The Power of a Birthright Mega Event.” E Jewish Philanthropy. June 2013.
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity.” Amnesty International. 1 February 2022.
AbuZayyad, Ziad. “The Dual Legal System: Apartheid Regime or Two-State Solution.” Palestine/Israel Journal. 2016.
Alsaafin, Linah. “The colour-coded Israeli ID system for Palestinians.” Al Jazeera. 18 November 2017.
Masters, Jonathan and Merrow, Will. “US Aid to Israel in Four Charts.” Council on Foreign Relations.
Knutson, Jacob. What to know about US aid to Israel. Axios.
Sax, Sarah. “They’re Supposed to Be Socially Conscious Investors. Why Are They Funding the War on Gaza?” The Nation. 16 February 2024.
Crowley, Michael, and Wong, Edward. “Gaza War Turns Spotlight on Long Pipeline of US Weapons to Israel.” The New York Times. 6 April 2024.
“Israel hits Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs.” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. 2 November 2023.
Timeline of Palestine's History. Palestine Remix. Al Jazeera. 2013.
“The Nakba did not start or end in 1948.” Al Jazeera. 23 May 2017.
“The Arab Revolt.” Encyclopedia Britannica.
Deknatel, Frederick. “Denying the Nakba, 75 Years Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable.” DAWN. 15 May 2023.
Rubin, Barnett. “False Messiahs.” The Boston Review. 4 January 2024.
Sheizaf, Noam. “Hasbara: Why does the world fail to understand us?” +972 Magazine. 13 November 2011.
Thrall, Nathan. “How 1948 Still Influences the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Time Magazine. 14 May 2018.
Nashed, Matt. “More than 7,350 West Bank Palestinians arrested by Israel during Gaza war.” Al Jazeera. 22 March 2024.
“Palestine: At least 102 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza.” International Federation of Journalists. 4 April 2024.
Scott, Liam. “Media Weigh Ethics Over Access for Military Embeds to Gaza.” VOA News. 6 February 2024.
Federman, Josef. “Israel Passes Law Paving the Way to Expel Al Jazeera.” Time Magazine. 2 April 2024.
Schorsch, Ismar. “The Right to Question.” Jewish Theological Seminary. 15 January 2000.
Maass, Peter. “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them.” The Washington Post. 9 April 2024.

From the author: recommended reading

Below is a list of additional sources you can consult to learn more about the ongoing occupation of Palestine by Israel. They were influential in my learning, so I’ve listed them here:

Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza — Refaat Alareer
I Saw Ramallah — Mourid Barghouti
On Palestine — Noam Chomsky
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement — Angela Davis
Justice For Some — Noura Erakat
A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism — Edited by Esther Farmer, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky and Sarah Sills
Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation — Edited by Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek
Rifqa — Mohammed El-Kurd
An hour of sunlight: one Palestinian’s journey from prisoner to peacemaker — Sami Al Jundi & Jen Marlowe
Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation — Carolyn L. Karcher
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948—1978 — Geoffrey Levin
Israel/Palestine and the queer international — Sarah Schulman
This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature Anthology — Edited by Ahdaf Soueif & Omar Robert Hamilton
They Call Me Lioness — Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri
Overcoming Speechlessness — Alice Walker

Kayla Blau (she/her) is a queer Jewish writer and facilitator based in Seattle, WA. Her poetry and prose can be found in Crosscut, The Stranger, Mondoweiss, and Real Change, among others.

Edited by Briana Gwin and Jules Chung.

The featured artwork was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

Portrait of My Body in the Land of X

Meg Sykes — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:00:32 +0000

In the photos taken before I wore it, the gown hangs from a grape arbor. You can make out the beaded detail of its bodice, the hourglass curve of its skirt.

I have no memory of looking into a mirror before or after, but I must have. What I do recall is slipping out of my bathrobe and stepping into that gown. A hefty alabaster satin, it was an unlikely choice for summer. You could bustle the train with a pin, or you could let it trail behind you.

As an image, the gown does not look much different hanging from that arbor than it does from my shoulders. It hovers above the ground in the silhouette of a woman.

I was twenty when I began seeing the Land of X, and twenty-four when we promised to stay together.

There were hills that day and, in the distance, mountains. I had no idea how steep the climb ahead would be, what the landscape would have in store for me.

Fast forward three summers: come autumn, the Land of X began his doctorate at one university, and I began mine at another. There were logistical and financial reasons why the Land of X and I lived in different cities that year, but those don’t really matter.

I was twenty-seven and I was lucky; I was studying at the oldest Creative Writing PhD program in the country — I would have five years to dedicate myself to what I most loved doing.

All the while, I would stay on the promising road that brought me to the Land of X — my other commitment.

The Land of X is not an easy place to describe. Both tropical and polar, dry and marine, it could present itself as an atmosphere or a terrain; a place that, regardless of its climate or topography, required a map for anyone to negotiate.

There was also an inherent contradiction to these extremes.

Fresh cut flowers, for instance, were considered wasteful in the Land of X. Why buy what’s going to die anyway?

But I did buy flowers anyway. Whenever I’d place them in a vase, he’d rearrange my work so I could see how to display them the right way.

For nearly a decade, I’d watch these arrangements bloom fully, then droop, and eventually wither away.

I was always writing.

The Land of X would often remark: You are always in your head. Though having never written fiction himself, he had plans to write a novel.

Someday, it will happen.

My first semester in the city, I often rode the bus to campus, or else friends drove me. On the rare occasions when I drove myself, I entertained visions of losing control and plowing into oncoming traffic.

I had been told by the Land of X that I did not drive well.

During the first semester of my writing program, a hurricane made landfall.

In anticipation of what was to come, I’d watched the meteorologist track its messy progression from the gulf to the shore. The length of time it hovered over the city was among the many reasons it was distinctive.

Day in and day out, I was deeply aware of my aloneness. I longed for the storm to pass, for those around me to stay safe and protected — too much damage had already been done. At the same time, I wanted to protect my solitude.

Alone, the rain battering my window, I’d consult my reflection: the silhouette of a woman. You are here, this is the life you have made.

But also: What the fuck is wrong with you? Be thankful.

What he said wasn’t true — about my driving, that is. Rarely had the Land of X ridden with me in the driver’s seat. At the time, I’d probably shrugged it off; I was used to hearing such criticisms echo in the Land of X. Trusting his distorted perceptions more than I should have.

He’d say he knew me better than anyone.

Most of the time, I believed him.

After the storm cleared, leaving the city with its destruction — hundreds of thousands of homes damaged, their residents displaced — I met with a therapist. Her office was stuffy, walls the color of gravy.

A few sessions in, she suggested I wanted to get away from the Land of X. Had that ever occurred to me?

I canceled her services shortly thereafter. This isn’t working, I told her.

In the mirror, the image of one’s movement is always slower than one’s actual movement.

Unlimited Raisin, Crisp Magenta, Almond Hustle, Berry Bliss, Strike a Rose, Citrus Slice —

Lipstick doesn’t look natural.

It didn’t matter what shade I wore. He preferred me without lipstick.

In the Land of X, I was governed by want, a warped desire to please. Rules became law.

There were so many laws to keep track of. Avoiding lipstick was just one example.

That all women who look into mirrors are vain is a misconception. Sometimes women look into mirrors to confirm that they are still here.

Another law: one should not bathe without remembering to scrub the tub.

Taking baths is like bathing in your own filth.

How many miles in before I stopped pushing back, stopped speaking up when a law in the Land of X didn’t align with my beliefs, my memory? Somewhere along the way, I learned it was easier to nod my head in agreement when it came to the opinions I disagreed with. I was separating from my body, or my body was separating from me.

Was it my imagination, or was the road beneath my feet crumbling too?

If one spends too much time attempting to navigate the wilderness of the Land of X, they risk incurring long-term consequences for the brain. Or becoming lost entirely.

While pursuing my degree, I also taught creative writing classes for the local community. I began encouraging my fiction students to think of their characters’ tics. I described someone who was continually twirling her hair, how particular that behavior is for an adult. People like this, I told them, are probably anxious. They have a lot on their minds!

At the end of the workshop, one of the students mentioned that I twirl my hair.

Haha, how funny.

Did I realize?

Coerce can be traced back to the Latin, coercere: “to confine, to restrain, to repress.” It can be difficult to recognize coercion when there are no marks to evince it.

Day after day, light fell at a slant. Long after the hurricane had cleared, my longing for solitude remained. On my own, I nearly felt complete.

In the Land of X, I was an endless work-in-progress, a draft.

Years later, it’s easy to forget certain things. Like a third law of the Land of X, which stipulated that I must one day let my long brown hair grow gray.

Never mind that I was in my twenties when this was first imposed — or that the preference was shaped by the fact that his own mother had let her hair go this way.

Yesterday, I found a single silver strand while I stood brushing my hair in front of the mirror.

In the Land of X, one must anticipate the shifting landscape. How the very ground beneath one’s feet will shift, tilt you off balance.

You’re a liar.

Projection occurs when the manipulator accuses the target of the quality about himself that he fears most.

The Land of X would call me manipulative.

You exaggerate.

A fourth law in the Land of X: all of our children would be boys — blond, and light-eyed, like him. Features that were the opposite of mine. Living in the Land of X meant not only conforming to his vision, but also reproducing his mirror image.

You’re trying to be unhappy.

Who tries to be unhappy?

The Land of X had a way of exerting pressure on me. His hand, for instance, on my stomach during road trips, when I’d ask him to pull over so I could use the bathroom. He would then laugh and keep driving.

Another law. One must suppress their urges in the Land of X — even those deemed essential or unavoidable.

Holding it in is good for you.

What I tell my writing students:

Everything you write is important.

Keep a document for experimentation.

Don’t be afraid to mess up, to ask questions.

Yours is a story worth telling.

I remember with precision the day I began cutting my portions. It followed the day after the Land of X and I attended a party, and the host sent us home with pie — a slice for him and a slice for me.

Later, in the blunt glow of the kitchen, against the winking glint of appliances: my face bowed over the first empty Tupperware, a scrim of cream filling puffing the rim.

I was already tearing into the Land of X’s portion but couldn’t taste anything.

More than eating, more than sleeping — I was always writing.

I didn’t eat red meat, but the Land of X vowed that I would begin to do so by the time I was pregnant. This, yet another law, and one he said I’d enjoy.

You’ll have to do what’s best for the baby.

Eventually, he convinced himself he wanted to homeschool his children, to be a stay-at-home dad.

He claimed that if the roles were reversed, I would be too busy writing.

In the Land of X, the trees lost their leaves, then their branches. Bark sloughed off their trunks. Soon, everything was uphill. Everything hollowed out and parched.

Body dysmorphic disorder yields a warped view of one’s appearance. When coping with it, the brain invents a flaw or exaggerates a physical feature. It might not be a flaw at all. Like the machinations of the brain that invents the flaw, it, too, might also be an invention.

As I got smaller, my voice changed, lilted higher.

Holding it in is good for you.

Down to ninety-two pounds, I lost the ability to make decisions.

Every day, I arranged and rearranged my flowers.

What scared me most: being disbelieved.

He was so nice! Everyone said so. People seemed to enjoy their brief visits to the Land of X. Why shouldn’t I enjoy being there, too?

I made sure to praise him outwardly to acquaintances, family, and friends. I reflected what I wanted to be real about him. The Land of X turned carnival, a funhouse mirror.

To this day, I’ll log into the Cloud and rediscover photos of a thin, beaming young woman.

During my final year with the Land of X, we lived in a suburb between our universities, across the country from our families.

We rarely had friends over. Or went out to see them.

Instead, I walked the two-mile loop around the lake out back and habitually forgot the season. It was easier to take the path there. Less erratic than the trek through the Land of X.

Disassociation: A discontinuation, a rupture. A break in the connective tissue between what’s happening in one’s mind and body, what’s unfolding around them.

Making my mind go elsewhere was how I survived in the Land of X.

Shortly after we moved to the suburbs, I began volunteering at a memory care center. A choice spurred by longing, by desperation: I wanted to feel close to someone or to something. To help those who were vulnerable.

Often, I felt guilty for feeling the way that I did. I poured my energy into doing things for others, avoiding the thought of what it would be like to go someplace where the ground didn’t crumble beneath my feet. To leave the Land of X —

At the memory care center, there were two major rooms for the residents to gather.

There was the recreation room with the large TV, and against the back wall, a nursery for those who wanted to mirror parents, who tended to dolls like real babies. Then there was the main living room with its sky-blue couches, cream-colored carpet, and big windows with a view of the courtyard.

That was the first room you encountered upon stepping foot in the center. It’s where the residents who were in the early stages of the disease drank their coffee, played games. Those were the residents who didn’t yet require a caregiver to help them eat.

I remember seeing myself in the mirror opposite the table, my mouth opening as I drew in forkfuls.

For Alzheimer’s patients, the forgetting has to do with damaged nerve endings. The more time that passes, the greater the injury.

But the person with Alzheimer’s does not notice these changes. Like trauma-affected brains, brains afflicted with Alzheimer’s will compensate for the damage that has occurred to them.

It happens in stages. The initial symptoms are hidden and can begin as early as twenty years before a person notices them.

It took me years to recognize that anything was actually wrong with the situation I was in.

Spring became summer, or summer turned to fall.

I got healthier, gained back what I’d lost.

Mirrors were discouraged at the memory care center. It could be disorienting for residents to encounter their own reflections. Some translated what they saw as a stranger.

As my body began to recover, the Land of X said he was glad I’d gotten my ass back.

It was something to think about losing part of yourself, then regaining it. One could lose themselves entirely in the Land of X — what would the process of total recovery entail?

I often wondered if the mirrors I gazed into weren’t two-way mirrors. Or maybe I simply wanted them to be, if only for someone to intervene.

I am still wondering what my memory does and does not retain.

In my shared apartment with the Land of X, my best days were the ones when we were apart. While walking, the lake’s bluish surface was broken and choppy. Whenever the wind blew my hair into my face, I’d quicken my pace, unable to see straight. But trusting the ground would remain steady beneath my feet.

Twice, a resident at the memory care center fell on my watch, and both times, it was as though I were watching the fall in slow motion, the body plummeting forward.

Portrait of my body positioned in the Land of X: Portrait of my body / behind a window / inside a mirror / within an apartment / overlooking a lake made of glass. A lake my body could easily fall forward into.

You can retrain the brain’s memory of trauma, but you cannot erase the trauma altogether from the brain.

While working with the residents, you must not let them see you upset.

Memory care patients read into faces.

In the Land of X, one must work to make their face unreadable.

You’re so much better than you used to be.

The arid season commenced. In the Land of X, the air grew hot and dry; it was all the better to catch fire.

While the minds of the residents I worked with were slowly deteriorating, I was beginning to recall what it was like to feel things.

I soon became struck by the narrow distance between the balcony and the bed, for instance. How easy it would be to walk out.

There were many nights when I found myself floating into the dark.

The last time the Land of X saw me he hugged me so hard, I pulled away —

Daylight gave way to darkness, and inside the dark was a car on a long, lit path.

After our final meeting, I drove down one block and then another. Maybe I called my parents, my sister — I don’t remember. But I did pull over, cut the engine. My pulse thrumming my temples as I laid my head against the wheel.

I was exhausted and afraid, relieved and enraged.

Eventually, I got my voice back, too.

So many things would change, from my passwords to the name I used to introduce myself to strangers.

Yes, my name is Theodora Ziolkowski, I told a customer service representative between my teeth.

Imposter syndrome: The failure to reconcile the person you are with the person you believe yourself to be. A doubling borne from doubting.

To this day, I am still pained by situations for which I must continuously prove myself to be believed.

The first week I lived on my own, I listened to Mia Farrow narrate the audio recording of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby.

While Rosemary was decorating and refurbishing the Bramford, I was washing the glasses and silverware I bought from Target, drying each piece before carefully setting it into the cupboard. Finding homes for my belongings in the garage loft that I alone was renting.

At one point, I dropped a plate while I was unpacking.

This is no dream! This is really happening!

The first thing my friends said when I told them I’d left the Land of X: You look like yourself again.

In the months after, I filled my hours studying and holding hands with the residents. I taught more creative writing classes, trained to teach a barre class. I was eager to reconnect with my body in ways that my body remembered.

Other times, I cruised through the clotted arteries of I-10 and 290, listening to podcasts about loneliness and self-love, stories from divorcees. In one, a woman who leaves her husband describes how her husband warned her that, without him, her life would shrink to the size of a postage stamp.

Forgetting painful memories can be a mode of survival. Once separated, one may choose to block out certain moments from being in the Land of X — until something in the present happens, and then one remembers.

When a student in my fiction workshop turned in the first chapter of her novel, she gave the class the disclaimer: I don’t know if my protagonist should get out of her marriage.

The husband in her draft was emotionally and physically abusive. These traits are enacted in the novel’s opening pages.

Well, your character should probably change in some way, I told the student gently.

And though the student asked me directly what I thought the wife’s course of action should be, she also retorted that she didn’t want to make it appear as though it was so easy for her.

I want readers to see how hard it is. They’re not going to get it.

It was while driving in the dark, listening to the part that Rosemary discovers the claw marks on her body, that I saw a shape bloom in the middle of the road, red eyes and white fur.

I pumped the brakes, just missing the body —

The possum resembled a zombie bride dragging herself away.

I, too, dragged myself away.

After I made it past the barre teacher audition, it was time to learn the choreography.

Where I struggled was memorizing what move to do next. I kept reversing the order of when to do which. There wasn’t enough space left in my mind to keep track.

During training, I made my arms copy the trainer’s arms. I watched the mirror.

When I left the Land of X, it was as if I had been freed from some invisible corset. Or like my chest had never been caged to begin with.

Only then did I find the language to say this.

When I failed to reproduce the movements exactly, I felt a jolt when the trainer adjusted me.

I didn’t need anyone to make me move a certain way.

All these years later, the wild relief of having left can still surprise me.

What a wonder, to find yourself in a different position — a different place — than you imagined.

Some days I look back on that time, and some days I don’t. Now, there is an immediacy to everything I do. The ground solid, the sun rising and falling just there, on the other side of those trees.

A year ago, I was exploring the grounds of the little university town I now teach in. The sky was a brushwork of rouge and lilac, the dirt roads bright with frost. And it was almost as though I were driving through a still life, or as if the great rush of my life were fresh paint on a canvas: a flurry of colorful strokes, every inch of backdrop covered over.

Everything beating for its life like a heart.

Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of the novella, On the Rocks, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award, and the short story chapbook, Mother Tongues. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Short Fiction (England), and Prairie Schooner, among others. In the past, Ziolkowski served as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, Fiction Editor for Big Fiction, and Assistant Poetry Editor for Black Warrior Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, where she was the recipient of the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing. Currently, she teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Her debut poetry collection, Ghostlit, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press.

Edited by Briana Gwin and Joyce Chen.

The featured artwork was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

The Art of Waiting

Meg Sykes — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:00:25 +0000

1. Start with a name

By the end of this pamphlet, you will be able to practice the art of waiting in three simple steps. The first step is to name your waiting. A name allows you to orient yourself within the experience. Please name the following, filling in the blanks:

Waiting for the water to boil CERTAINTY

Waiting for the bus to arrive TRUST

Waiting for the right person LONELINESS

Waiting for the right time REGRET

Waiting in traffic SURRENDER

Waiting in line NECESSITY

Waiting to live RESENTMENT

Waiting to die ENLIGHTENMENT

Brenda clicks the pen closed on her lips, reviewing her answers. She has a looming sense that they say more about her than she wants. Frightening. She looks up from the pamphlet in her lap to survey her surroundings.

There are eight other people sitting at various angles in various corners of the light-brown room. Five fake plants. Two stacks of magazines, the topmost of which boasts the headline “28 Shortcuts to Happiness in 2028.” One desk attendant scrolling expressionlessly on their phone. A muted TV displaying a slideshow of infographics, a queue of names and the time permanently bolded in the lower right-hand corner. It is 8:44 a.m., precisely.

Brenda turns the page in her lap, lets out a little sigh, and continues to read.

Experience of time is shaped by the waters you occupy. Some waters are swift and shallow. Others are languid and deep. Consider the essence of this specific moment. How is time flowing around you? What choices brought you to this depth? Why are you sitting still amidst movement? Erode your answers to the core. This is the name of your waiting.

The numbers on the TV quietly change to 8:45 a.m. The desk attendant calls out the first name on the televised queue.

"Jordan...Jordan. It is your turn." No one stands up. A few knees shift. Brenda glances up from her page. "No Jordan?" The desk attendant continues with a somewhat disappointed edge to their flat voice. "Moving along then. Stephanie."

A woman in a floor-length coat slowly stands up from her seat and ambles toward the hallway entrance. Someone opens the door from inside and Stephanie disappears behind it. Brenda returns to the page.

I remember as a child, waiting for Netflix DVDs to arrive in the mail, for the fish to bite, for my boobs to grow. I waited for my dad to come home from work, for thunder to crack, for myself to suddenly die. I experienced time as the color of pale sky, the tone of a wind chime, the shape of a gun safe. I named it all BLUE.

At 8:52 a.m., a man enters the room. He wears dark clothes, a red beanie, and white sneakers plastered in wet grass.

"Here for my morning appointment," he steams, out of breath.

"Jordan," the desk attendant greets him matter-of-factly. "Unfortunately, you’ve missed your time slot. You have been bumped to the end of the line."

Brenda watches how Jordan processes this information. How his hands become fists and then flex into stars. He exhales a marvelous breath of acceptance. "Alright," he says, slumping down across from Brenda with a resigned sigh. “At least I’m allowed to wait here.”

Brenda resumes her reading, reminded of the task at hand.

To name a passing moment is to assert the bedrock of your bones against the ticking clock. You are time-layered; a temporal sedimentation rich with anticipation, consideration, dedication and slowness. You accrete love and erode grief in a cycle older than any timepiece. To name your waiting is to say, “Hello, Time That Passes, I’m glad you’re here with me.”

"I've never seen you here before," a quiet but intent voice says, momentarily pulling Brenda back into the room. "I know everyone here and your name isn't on the list."

Brenda blinks at the man named Jordan who is speaking to her. He’s not wrong. "Oh. Yes..." Brenda says, feeling suddenly unsure about her decision to read in this particular waiting room. "I am waiting," she reassures him, "just not for an appointment," she finishes unconvincingly.

"Okay?" Jordan says suspiciously. "They have something else here besides appointments?"

"Well," Brenda says, hesitating, "I’m here because of this." She holds up the small, nondescript pamphlet from her lap, its appearance characteristic of pandemic publications made by those with access to printers during the 2020 lockdown. Stamped in the corner of the hand-folded cover is a digital alarm clock with a shattered screen reading 9:99 a.m. Centered in bold is a title: The Art of Waiting.

"Ahh. You're one of those," Jordan says, taking Brenda in with raised eyebrows.

Brenda looks back at him, deciding how to respond. "I am not exactly sure what you mean by one of those… I am a journalist. I’m reporting on the public response to the recent executive order. You know, the anti-waiting law. This little pamphlet is having a major comeback for obvious reasons. I'm sure you've heard?"

"Psh. Have I heard? Of course I've heard,” Jordan says dryly. “You know, they used to leave that pamphlet in our waiting rooms when it first came out — what is it, eight years ago now? Ha!" He chuckles, remembering something. Brenda suppresses the urge to ask what he’s thinking, practicing her hard-learned journalistic patience. "They didn’t realize the weight those papers held until they criminalized waiting in public spaces,” he adds. “Have you got to the third part yet?"

Brenda shakes her head, wondering what this little pamphlet meant to him.

Jordan leans his head back over the chair and closes his eyes. "Just you wait," he sighs knowingly. "Just you wait."

2. Decide how to sit

"Sara!" Timothy yells from the bedroom suite. "Sara! Have you seen my glasses? I can't read without them!"

Timothy rummages loudly through his mahogany nightstand. A shaft of pale morning light freezes his unmade sheets into stiff satin peaks. Dust floats half-alive across the chamber. Timothy grumbles, bending his aged knees to look under the bed.

"Just use ChatRead," Sara yells from the living room in a distracted monotone.

"I know, I know," Timothy mutters, more to himself than anyone. "The act of reading is so archaic and time-consuming. Sue me for wanting to remember HOW IT FEELS TO READ."

"You go on then, babe," Sara encourages from the living room.

Timothy searches for some minutes in the dresser and glances into the walk-in closet before finally plopping down into his well-worn armchair with a sigh. "ChatRead," Timothy says dejectedly. "Continue reading The Art of Waiting.”

"Hello, Timmy," an ethereal voice says from everywhere and nowhere in particular. "Happy to read with you today. I will begin where we left off. Did you remember your tea?"

"Yes. Yes, I remembered my tea, goddamnit," Timothy mumbles to the empty room.

"Alright. Here we go."

The second step to the art of waiting is deciding how to sit. There are many ways to sit: in a chair, on the floor, over your heels, in the dirt. You can sit across from someone or alone, or silently slouched over a phone. Some sit by standing, which is not exactly sitting, but can hold the same intent. How you decide to sit reflects the name you give your waiting.

"Timothy, can you turn it down?" Sara yells from the living room. "I can't hear the morning news. It looks like there was another riot in the Park last night. By those Waiters. I guess that's what they call themselves..." She pauses, presumably to take a sip of coffee. "You always turn that thing up so loud. Might be time to get hearing aids, honey."

"I can hear just fine, honey," Timothy replies over ChatRead's disembodied voice, which he’d refined to be softly accented and richly layered. It reminds him of his late wife, though he would never admit this to Sara. She already knows the depth of his grief for Beth, which still hasn’t found bottom eight years after the fact.

Occasionally, the oppressive enforcement of time leads an individual to lose all awareness of the poetry of sitting. These individuals most likely regard time as a set of red-god-eyes glowing from their wrist, phone, and microwave, compelling them thoughtlessly onward. They are encouraged to glide seamlessly from task to task without the burden of wasted time. Waiting is slated as vestigial and wasteful. They forget how to sit. This concept is not only incorrect, but also dangerous to our freedom.

"I don't want to hear that nonsense, honey. You know it's a bunch of dangerous propaganda," Sara yells from the living room. "The lady on the news said her son's best friend's uncle went to prison after reading that pamphlet. If you aren't careful, you'll become a criminal like the rest of those Waiters. I don't understand why you are so intrigued by this uprising."

Timothy stares out the window at the dry fields rolling freely toward the horizon. He recalls the last time he saw snow on those fields, at least a decade ago, before the pandemic that claimed Beth’s life. They had spent an entire day building a larger-than-life snowman. It was so tall they had to use a step ladder to adorn the face by moonlight. The next morning just before sunrise, they crunched their way across the field with steaming mugs of coffee in hand to rest their backs against their enormous creation. He sat next to her and sipped in quiet anticipation. At last, the sun peeked over the horizon with an incredible exhalation of light. Even Beth somehow shone brighter that morning.

With a sigh that briefly fogs the glass, Timothy returns to the current morning. The window reflects his old, wrinkled face over the tired brown earth with a weary similitude. Tree skeletons reach solemnly skyward at the edge of his favorite creek, water trickling quietly through the end of yet another warm winter.

Time passes regardless of wealth, status and power. There is no way around it. You are simply immersed. You can sit with intention or you can drown.

"There is nothing else to it," he says quietly to the room. “How unbridled every morning felt, sitting next to you.”

3. Do not be fooled by urgency when you are a rock

Seldom wakes with a start, hand already snoozing her tired phone alarm. There are never enough hours to sleep. With a yawn, she rolls onto her side, swiping her phone open to text Justin back.

hey, sorry Justin, i fell asleep

GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE

calm down. how did it go last night, is everyone okay?

yeah we're all good. they couldn’t handle us in the dark, Sel, it was funny as hell

everyone knows clocksuckers are afraid of the dark

they swept us at dawn, the usual bullshit. when the Park goes dark, we do it again.

i missed you Justin, my toes got cold

i missed your toes, where are they now?

oh, just wading in the edge of today

wading wading wading, where will they take you?

to deeper waters where rocks grow big and strong

you’ve always been a boulder to me Sel, grounding me through darkness

you’ve always been BOLDER to me Justin, out there in the Park-ness…haha

well now, don’t we make a good team?

that we do. i gotta go make my moves, be safe tonight

be slow, my love

Seldom clicks her phone black and rolls onto her back, defeated by a week of overtime at the clinic followed by supply runs for her friends at the Park. It’s like the third part of the pamphlet says: “You simply cannot rise before you learn to fall.” She stares at the dust motes napping in her precious morning light. Stacks of books, notes, lists, and receipts accompany her body on the sun-dappled bed, as though they too desire a place to rest. “I am ready to rise,” she says out loud, practicing.

With a long stretch, she reaches for the radio tucked under her bed. It is compact, about the size of a good book, all silver and black with a faded sticker of a broken clock on the back. Justin gave it to her eight years ago when everything stopped moving in lockdown. He told her it was something old to commemorate how the times were indeed changing.

“It’ll still work in 100 years, Sel,” he had said excitedly over the phone when she found the package he'd tucked behind the flower pot on her building’s front stoop. “Radio waves are timeless. If we don’t make it through this pandemic, at least the waves will.” She remembers laughing with Justin over the phone, tears in her eyes, afraid of everything that was changing.

She sighs and pushes the power button, extending the little antenna. The radio is always set to 99.9AM, the local frequency over which the best morning broadcast reigns, complete with jazz, weather and more recently, the daily Waiter update. “It’s 9:99 a.m. here at 99.9AM,” the broadcasters say at the start of every show, “Our time.”

This morning, her favorite voice is wrapping up the daily update with a reading of the third and final section of The Art of Waiting pamphlet. Seldom lies quietly in the pool of her bed, letting the rhythm of the words settle over her tired form, one little moment before the inevitable movement of her day must begin.

“The third step comes to us this morning in a poem,” the broadcaster begins.

If time is a river, why run on shore?
Wade into the current, a little bit more
Sit down in the flow on the endless bed
This may take some time depending on swiftness and depth

You may feel pressed to hurry out and run with the clock:
Do not be fooled by this urgency when you are a rock
No heat nor pressure can match that which transformed
Your eroded bones into eons-old stones

Stronger are the seconds that stall upon your form
A sediment becoming you before you were born
Where the current is swift, you grow heavy; where it is deep, you grow tall
You simply cannot rise before you learn to fall

And in this moment where you sit and wait
For hunger, pain, and grief to dissipate
With no escape, weary heart becoming older,
Know that time is with you as you grow bolder.

“And that’s a wrap, folks. Catch us waiting in the Park until we simply cannot wait a minute longer to rise. Wherever your day takes you, we hope it rocks.”

Sabs Stein spends forty hours a week as a front desk attendant in a waiting room, experiencing eternity alongside a rotating cast of strangers. They are interested in how our relationships to the passage of time shape our movements and lives. Sabs is a writer, river, and disco ball subsisting on broth and electricity.

Edited by Joyce Chen and Jules Chung.

The featured artwork was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

At the Cut

Meg Sykes — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:00:06 +0000

The American dentist who shot Cecil the Lion once said, If I had known this animal had a name … I obviously wouldn’t have killed it.

When I was eight years old, my uncle teased me because I didn’t know how to pronounce my own name. It was an injury that I have never fully recovered from. We were all crowded around the kitchen table one Saturday morning, legs pressed against one another’s, waiting for family breakfast to begin. My father had pushed a plate of fatty eggs onto the table, next to a basket of pita bread cut into limp triangles. The phone rang just before we started eating. I climbed down from my chair and answered it the way my father had taught me to: Hello, Monem residence.

When I got back to the table, my uncle laughed and said, Why did you say our name like that?

It was the 1990s. He had been trying all winter to make his laugh sound like Eddie Murphy’s. It was working. That’s not how you say it.

(More laughing.)

That’s not even our name.

My brother Chris, or Walid — depending on who was asking — came to my defense. No that’s right, he said, Mow-nemm. My other brother Alex, or Rami — depending on who was asking — raised a mocking eyebrow and said, No it’s not, it’s Maw-nem. My uncle Hossam or Sam — depending — laughed again and told them they were both wrong. No, it’s Moh-niem. I felt my father’s long-fingered hand on my arm then, and everyone went quiet. My father said to me, It’s your name, you can say it however you like. Disoriented and embarrassed, I felt the heat rise up into my cheeks. I didn’t want the freedom to say my name however I liked — I wanted to know how to say it right.

Whatever the “correct” pronunciation supposedly was, my uncle was right to reject its reality. It wasn’t real if a last name’s realness lies in its connection to generations, if it is meant to serve as a tether through time — both a kind of memory-keeping and a form of constitutional address: this is, I am, they are. I would only learn years later, when I was in high school, or maybe even after, that the name that is now my name was invented by my father during his interview at the German embassy in Cairo sometime in the late 1960s. He’d been there to apply for his student visa, and his last name (my real last name) was too long to fit on the form they gave him. The clerk insisted that if my father wanted to emigrate to Europe, he had to choose a name that would fit on the form.

Arabic naming conventions go beyond the gesture of memory-keeping: they are explicit records of a family history — long, sometimes exhausting, often unutterable to the western tongue. My father was faced with the decision to either keep his name and be forever confined to his history, or to cut it short for the chance to be modern. He had been born in an Egypt still limping under the weight of British colonial rule, and even though he was still a young man, he had lived long enough to have his heart broken by revolution. Maybe that is why he chose the cut. Maybe he felt that whatever history was evoked by his name was already a ruin.

Confronted by my father’s choice at the breakfast table, by the awful weightlessness of my name, I suddenly found it hard to locate myself. My arms felt far away — or was it the table? I concentrated on my plate, on pinching up food with my bread. I pinched and ate and pinched and ate, and by the time I looked up again, the table was empty. Only the spent fūl platter kept me company, its galaxies of oil and vinegar catching rainbows in the midwinter sun.

Though & because it confuses the tongue,
let me repeat this: the flowers are ours the flowers
are ours the flowers are ours

— Zeina Hashem Beck¹

That afternoon, my uncle tried to make amends by inviting me to run errands with him. But despite the fact that it was one of my favorite things to do, I refused — still sulking. I watched him reverse out of the driveway alone soon after, leaving behind tracks of gray slush in the soft new snow. Staring through the window after him, I looked at the cluster of tall pines that stood in between our hastily-built house and our quiet suburban street at the edge of Toronto. It was a small congregation of trees left over from a time before so many hastily built houses were required. There was a humming silence in the house, punctured only by the turn of the washing machine. It was the kind of accusatory quiet that made me feel observed, and I was: every movement I made roused the attention of my father, who was playing solitaire at the kitchen table. I squinted at the hazy sun, oatmeal-coloured behind a veil of thin gray cloud. The days were short in midwinter, but there was still plenty of time to escape the silence of the house, plenty of snow outside to make a place to sit inside, unseen.

My father called out to me shortly after I decided I went to put on my snowsuit, asking me where I was going. I told him I was just going out front.

Alone? I nodded. Okay, he said, but the sun is already low. Remember the Jinn.

I would often ask my father about the Jinn, but no matter how patient his explanations might have been, the Jinn always shifted in my partial understanding. I didn’t know what to make of them, or how to imagine them. My madrassa teacher looked at me impatiently whenever I asked where they came from or how they lived. She told me that the Jinn are beings made of smokeless fire or hot wind, not earth and water like humans. She told me that they conceal themselves in trees or out-of-the-way places until sunset, when they roam the earth causing mischief, confusing and tricking people, taking them away, or worse. Looking at the low sun, I wondered if there were Canadian Jinn, or if they immigrated like my father did from Egypt — or perhaps from Sudan, or Palestine. I wondered if they had names, and how long their names were, and if our human tongues could pronounce them. I wondered if they wore clothes, if they had to wrap up warm against the winter chill, and if so, who made their clothes. If there was a whole shadowy Jinn economy we couldn’t see. And then I decided this was too much not to see and that the Jinn were things made up by fathers to keep their daughters inside.

I called to my father at the kitchen table, Baba, are the Jinn real?

He shrugged. They are mentioned in the Quran a few times.

I didn’t know if that meant that he thought they were real, or not.

The silence was different outside. Proud. Stretching out wide and returning from far away. I surveyed the space between the pines and dropped to my knees, pulling snow toward me, packing it down. I drew and rolled and packed and built up a curved wall just big enough to hold me, and then I set to work on the other side, arching the walls upward so that they fell just short of meeting. The blue-gray sky was barely visible through the almond-shaped aperture overhead. Lying on my back with my arms folded behind me, I listened to the wind sweep the snow from the branches above, the pine needles in quiet conversation. Further away, I could make out the dumb speed of the highway slicing through the earth and throwing brown slush on what bare patches of land remained.

Earlier that year, my third grade teacher had taught us that when Adam was in paradise, he was given the role of naming the animals. This astounded me, that a job as important as naming the animals was given to a human, and one so newly created. As an adult, I have often revisited that passage from the bible, but each time I am disappointed; the story is brief and insufficient, as if truncated from memory. It doesn’t list the names Adam chose for the animals, for instance, or how long they were, or what language he used to name them. Nor does it indicate whether the animals acknowledged their names, or if they had their own way of addressing one another. The passage only mentions how Adam named the animals based on his need and vantage point — what the animals were to him, what use they had. And of course there was no mention of the animals for which Adam had no use. While I am searching, I see various theological debates online about whether or not Adam’s naming of the animals was in fact an act of bringing the animals into being — of poesis, rather than onomasia.

As I am scrolling through various interpretations of this passage, I wonder about the name that is not my name, and what sort of new being it brought into existence, or what kinds of possibilities it foreclosed. It is a name that both constitutes and effaces me, tethering me to no one and nowhere. I wonder for whom it is most useful.

I didn’t know then that not far from where my eight-year-old self was lying on the snow-packed earth that day, watching my breath bloom into puffs of clouds in the weak winter light, the last residential school in Ontario was winding down its official functions, preparing to close its doors for good. For over one hundred and fifty years, residential school systems operated throughout Canada, designed to annihilate Indigenous languages, kinships, and futures. In 1920, The Indian Act required by law that all Indigenous children attend these institutions. Some families would attempt to hide their children, even though they could face prosecution, or risk being denied the treaty payments they depended on for survival. Some parents were starving because their hunting and fishing rights had been taken away, and they reluctantly sent their children to these schools because their children were starving too. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police would come by train or by truck or by dogsled to round up the children. Sometimes they would tie them up to stop them from struggling, gathering more and more children as they sped through community after community, nation after nation.

When they arrived at their new schools, the children were separated from their siblings and other relatives, bathed in hot water, given thin European clothes, and forbidden from speaking their language. Because language is a body that can resist. The children would also have their hair cut short, an act reserved for mourning in many Indigenous traditions. Within those customs, the length of hair cut often signifies the length of time spent with a departed loved one — the closer the relation, the closer the cut.

Residential school survivor Daniel Kennedy (or, Ochangkuga’he) recounted his arrival at the Qu’Appelle school in Saskatchewan in his memoir, Reflections of an Assiniboine Chief. In it, he described the horror he felt at seeing his hair shorn so close to his scalp, and how he wondered, silently, if it was cut so short because his mother had died. He didn’t have the language to ask the nuns who were handling him with such efficient cruelty, and so he quietly wept. The principal at the Qu’Appelle residential school then asked Ochangkuga’he’s for his name, and when it was given, the principal remarked that there were no letters in the alphabet to spell it, and no civilized tongue could pronounce it. It was then that Ochangkuga’he’s name was erased, and in its place a new English name was entered into the school’s entry form. The institution that Ochangkuga’he was forced to attend was named after what is now called the Qu’Appelle River in Saskatchewan, a French phrase that means Who Calls? The French name is a misunderstanding of the Cree name for the river: Kah-tep-was, or River that Calls. The French is framed as a question, to which an answer is already given.

I can’t tell you anything new about the river—
you can’t tell a river to itself.

—Natalie Diaz²

In my temporary shelter of snow underneath the pines, the walls were tingeing purple, and the clouds overhead were becoming more pronounced against the darkening pink sky. I whispered the name that was not my name again and again; stretched out its vowels, made them go slack, sharpened its consonants or smoothed them over. If my uncle told me our real family name that day, I didn’t remember it. That, or my western tongue could not pronounce it. He did tell me once that our inherited name is very old, older than most countries — certainly older than the country that granted me my citizenship at birth. How many generations old? I wondered. How did the first generations of our family say our name? What shape did their mouths make as they said it? I turned on my side and rested my head on my arm, tracing shapes on the wall of snow in the changing light. I drew circle after circle, connecting them up in a chain around me until it became too dark to see where to put the next loop.

All at once, the dangers of darkness occurred to me.

The sunset, and the Jinn, and the whispering, and the taking — I burst up through the snowy wall and scrambled to my feet, sliding my way through the small group of silhouetted trees between me and the front door, tripping and getting up again and running face-first into a low hanging branch. The skin on my lip, cold-hardened and dry, slid easily apart. I felt a stream of blood warm my chin, dripping in heavy black spots through the perfect white snow. I watched as the drops fell, unable to find the words to call out, wondering if this was how the Jinn would find me — face covered in blood and body frozen in panic, only steps from my front door. Or maybe this is how the Jinn left me, unsteady on my feet and without the language to help myself. The pain of my lip brought me back to my body, and I held a mitted hand to my face, listening to the wind, and for any new words it might contain. Then, I picked my way carefully across the driveway back to the house. I did not look back.

Many of the children that were taken to residential schools didn’t come home again. Generations of families have lived within the cold expanse of not knowing what happened to their children, or not recognizing the children who returned to them with new names and the language taken out of their mouths, forever changed by abuse and neglect. Since 2021, some of these missing children have been retrieved from unmarked graves at the sites of residential schools across Canada.

May 28, 2021: Kamloops Indian Residential School; Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation; remains found of two hundred and fifteen children.

June 4, 2021: Brandon Indian Residential School; Sioux Valley Dakota Nation; remains found of one hundred and four children.

June 24, 2021: Marieval Indian Residential School; Cowessess First Nation; remains found of seven hundred and fifty-one children.

July 2, 2021: St Eugene’s Mission School; Ktunaxa Nation; remains found of one hundred and eighty-two children.

July 12, 2021: Kuper Island Indian Industrial School; Penelakut First Nation; remains found of one hundred and sixty children.

There are four thousand, one hundred and thirty-nine names listed on the memorial site of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. This number will undoubtedly increase as more children are retrieved from the earth, and as they are reunited with their names.

One day, all gardens sprouted
from our names, from what remained
of hearts yearning.

— Hiba Abu Nada³

The year the children began to be retrieved from the earth, I returned to Canada and decided to revisit the house on the outskirts of Toronto where I grew up. It was smaller than I remembered: the garage painted a queasy beige color, and despite it being late summer, there was a plastic nativity scene perched uncertainly on the front balcony. But the same pines from my oldest childhood memories were there, still huddled together between the house and the road. Their trunks had thickened over time and bore new scars. They looked as if they had been there forever, maybe they had.

The pine tree is indigenous to this part of what is now called Ontario, Canada, in a stretch of unceded Anishinaabe territory. They are so much a part of this land, in fact, that when settlers first came and chopped down the trees to forge their towns and cities and wealth, the ground itself became untethered. The topsoil blew away on an unchecked wind, leaving only barren sand in which nothing would grow. Even the pines refused.

Shortly after the 1948 Nakba in Palestine, in the hills on the western side of what is now called Jerusalem — or Al-Quds, depending on who is asking — the Jewish National Fund planted a forest of Aleppo pines. After my visit home, I look up pictures of the forest to see if those pines look anything like the pines of my childhood, and I discover that the first tree was planted in 1950 by the second Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. After they had sufficiently expelled the people who lived on the land, they set about erasing the memory of them. All those who had been exiled from their homeland were no longer to be called Palestinians, but were renamed simply “Arabs.” A people severed from their land, who might belong to other places but not there. The new Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land — an arid, empty place that its new inhabitants made lush with their industriousness. The pines grew into a pleasant view from the city and its suburbs. They called this the Jerusalem Forest — a green belt, home to jackals.

Two aggressions ago, because time can be counted in seasons of aggression in Palestine, I saw a video of a scene outside of Al Aqsa Mosque. It was late spring 2021, around the same time that the bodies of Indigenous children began to be retrieved from the patient earth. The video I saw was filmed during Eid, and it showed a group of Israeli men dressed in crisp white shirts and black trousers dancing in front of the mosque as flames slowly crept up to its entrance. Someone had brought a sound system, and there were so many Israeli flags whipping violently in the wind that at first, I mistook the sound for thunder. The men jumped up and down in celebration of the flames, singing a song in unison. They sang the same words over and over — more of a curse than a song. The words they sang were yimach sheman, which means, may their names be erased.

Now
make room in the mouth
for grassessgrassesgrasses

— Layli Long Soldier⁴

In mid August 2021, a couple of weeks after my visit home, a wildfire broke out in the Jerusalem Forest. It raged for four days and engulfed eleven thousand dunams of trees planted in the anguish and optimism of Israel’s first years. The pines burned to cinders and ash, revealing a curious scene. Instead of arid earth, instead of emptiness or absence as the new national myths would suggest, the fire revealed structures in the hills — historic terraces that Palestinian farmers had cut into the mountains over six hundred years ago to cultivate the land. Those farmers would have known not to plant pines there, because pines are fire-loving trees. Instead, they planted olive trees and grapevines: crops that didn’t need much water, that held the earth together and kept fires at bay. Palestinians had been farming those terraces for generations, right up until 1948 when they were expelled, and their crops destroyed — a patchwork of trees planted over the memory of their labors. But more than seventy years later, the scorched and scarred earth was left to give its quiet account.

At the beginning of October 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant renamed the people who were once Palestinians for a second time, calling them human animals. I ask the internet how long it would take me to say the names of the more than thirty-five thousand Palestinians who have been killed since he said those words. Just under three hours, the internet replies. I assume this is a calculation based on the average length of English names. If I were to instead call out their full Arabic names, it might take me six hours. To cut this time short, maybe I could just say the names of the children, which might take me half as long — maybe three hours. Or maybe I could just say the names of the families that have been wiped out completely, their long histories erased from the civil registry: more than fifty since the beginning of October. This should take only an hour. But how to begin? I fear that once I’ve started, the horror of stopping would be too much to bear.

Today, in this season of aggression in Palestine, children in Gaza go to sleep with their names written on their bodies. They do this so they can be properly identified in case the worst happens in the night. And if the worst does happen, their names will be written on the thin white shroud that covers their bodies before burial. Survivors insist on writing the full names of the dead, however long they are, however small the shroud might be. Where bodies cannot be retrieved from the rubble, the names of the missing are sometimes painted on the ruined walls that remain. Insisting. There is an unrelenting dignity in these acts. A refusal to acquiesce to colonial force, despite ruin and even in death. A refusal to be overwritten, abbreviated, or erased — to be defined only by the brutality done to them, however spectacular that brutality turns out to be. The act of writing, repeating, and rehearsing the names of the dead and the disappeared is also to articulate an indictment.

A friend recently asked me, over breakfast, why I don’t reinstate my real last name.

Reclaim it, she insisted. Nadine el Mokkadam.

I consider this — what kind of reclamation would it be to reach back for a severed name and attempt a repair? I shook my head. I have always existed at the cut: to try to suture it would be an act of erasure, a form of self-annihilation. I arrived in the world to a capitulation of a name, but in refusing to silently bear that scar, and rather to insist on tracing its shape and origin, I am also attempting a form of address — a kind of indictment of colonial logic in both its banality and its unyielding horror. Scars are a kind of memory keeping too.

The survivors in Palestine who drape themselves over marked shrouds and weep, or who recount the many family members who have been killed by the chaotic cage of bombs puncturing the sky over Gaza, will often refer to their dead with the word: shaheed. This is usually translated into English as martyr, presented as evidence of the Arab’s glorification of — or insatiable lust for — religious war. But the word shaheed has an inflection, a specific meaning that is rarely invoked.

It also means witness.

From "Dear white critic" by Zeina Hashem Beck, in O, 2022
From "exhibits from The American Water Museum" by Natalie Diaz, in Postcolonial Love Poem, 2020
From "Not Just Passing" by Hiba Abu Nada, 2023. Palestinian poet and novelist, Hiba Abu Nada, was killed by Israeli forces in her home in Khan Younis, Gaza, on 20 October 2023.
From "Whereas" by Layli Long Soldier, 2017

Nadine Monem is an Egyptian-Canadian writer working in a hybrid form of speculative nonfiction that reaches back for new histories, and reaches forward for new kinships. Nadine graduated with an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from Birkbeck (University of London) in 2021 and since then her work has been supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop, Catapult Books, The Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast Journal and The Literary Consultancy. She is currently working on her first book, excerpts of which won the 2022 Queen Mary University Wasafiri New Writing Prize, and the 2023 Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Contest. Nadine lives and works in London, UK, and teaches cultural studies and criticism at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Edited by Brianna Gwin and Joyce Chen.

The featured artwork was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

The Year of Getting Better

Meg Sykes — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 18:21:24 +0000

“It’s the year of getting better,” her mother said as she walked into the room. It was Thora’s second hospital stay of the year. The first time was an accident, now it was on purpose.

“For pleasure,” her mother joked. This time was for The Surgery, the one that had become all the rage. Thora finally had a womb. She felt her puffy new face and the ocean of bandages below. Everything in one clean chop.

In the corner, Thora’s boyfriend Eli stared out the window at the spires of Manhattan. He was probably brooding about the medical debt she was racking up to The Company. He acted like it was his burden. Her mother was probably wondering when she’d get grandchildren. Her mother’s name was Lorna. She didn’t get along with Eli.

Almost everyone supported the world becoming one big Company-owned continent. It made sense at first. Now, goods traveled faster, in bright yellow packages with dancing electric mice logos. The US had collapsed under the gig economy until The Company bought a third of the government’s debt. They became the sole media-making conglomerate. The Company made certain cartoons required viewing. A squeaky mouse began to teach kids about amoebas, drugs, love, frog anatomy, and the Lascaux cave paintings. The Company sank the idea of love.

They idolized Andy Warhol and told kids he was a straight man who lived in Disneyland. Thora sounded like a crone when she tried to tell people he was a gay man. “He was not,” they said. “Not that we care.”

Further down the dystopian tunnel they started to care. It wasn’t a good time to be alive. Not that any time was. It was ahistorical to resent one’s position in time.

Lorna wanted Thora to date a nice cis boy. Eli hadn’t undergone the male equivalent of The Surgery. He didn’t want to be a dad. He preferred animals. His cat, the porcupine he fostered, videos of camels and bat pups.

“Incredible what they can do these days,” Lorna said, balancing a mint tea on her knee and smoking a cigarette.

“You can’t do that here,” Thora said.

“It’s fine, baby. No one’s here but us.”

“My lung.”

“Oh. Right.”

Thora’s first surgery of the year was for a pneumothorax. Her lung had spontaneously collapsed. Now, only a few months later, she was in pain again. It was difficult to keep up. She refused to look in a mirror.

Eli was the one who called it “The Surgery.” But it was. It was The Surgery. She was getting better. He was just pessimistic. Not that she blamed him. She’d made a trade. She had a new face, a pussy, and a womb now even if she couldn’t see them yet. Eli and her mother would have to wait as she cried out the poison chemicals. It would take time to adjust, to realize what she’d given up.

Eli stood up to find gummy worms and an energy drink. He wanted to give the two of them time to talk. Unfortunately, her mother only wanted to talk about her childhood while the TV illuminated tsunamis in Alaska, car bombs in Missouri, and a new Angel Disease cropping up in Ohio that caused patients to grow thorns.

“When you were young, your father always said the plagues would come for us,” Lorna began. “He thought we strayed too far from the original plan. Men and women and kids and all that. I don’t think he was right but it does make you think about all these Angel Diseases.”

That’s what the scientists called them. Cults capitalized on the language. Thora’s mother and father had even briefly joined one. Her father passed away from the fifth Angel Disease that went around. She no longer kept track of what number they were up to.

Eli re-entered the room, tearing off a surgical gown and guzzling his silly little beverage. “I don’t know why so many trans girls write about the apocalypse,” he said. “We’re here. It doesn’t feel very trans.”

“Shut up,” Thora said, digging her nails into her arms.

Her mother tried to light another cigarette and began talking about Thora’s high school years. Everyone assumed she was going to become a teacher. Young, gentle boys are always encouraged to be domestic but authorial. In high school she worked as a babysitter for an ESL program which later helped her land her first real job at an after-school program on the Upper West Side.

She worried people would find her existence offensive. They did. She failed to hold the pieces of her life far apart from each other. She walked children to and from school and got harassed by men who called her a pedophile on the subway. She was not cut out for such simple brutality, she told herself. Besides, she showed up to work with a hickey once and her boss nearly fired her.

“I don’t care, but what if a mom saw that?”

Thora turned red, knowing it was only going to get harder. Her co-workers, largely cis straight women, told her they never received comments like that despite showing up to work high or hungover. While she became fluent in mom-friendly lingo and demeanor — and even became employee of the year — she lived with constant fear in the panopticon.

Everyone at work debated whether or not they wanted to have kids. None of them asked Thora if she wanted kids. Could they still want one after having seen the process up close? The gross shit, their tantrums and fragility, the nightmare liars? But of course, there were also sweet angels like the one trans girl Thora taught. She would’ve done anything to protect that girl.

“You’re not still working at the after-school program are you?” her mother asked. “That would be hard to do while raising a kid.”

“No, I quit a while ago.”

“That’s for the best. When I had you I stopped working. Your father made enough money.” Her mother took a sip of tea and turned to Eli. “Do you make enough to support her?”

Thora was desperate for fruit. Apricots sounded absolutely heavenly. She wished Rose were still alive. Rose loved apricots.

One night, before The Company, before the womb was possible, Thora was tripping on acid with Rose, who wondered if she wanted to be a mother. Rose thought about “having it all.” She was asking the classic question: how much could a woman want before her desire becomes a yoke?

Rose said she thought Thora would be a good mother. They strolled to the park to stare at the trees and then took the train to Coney Island, watching the waves in the cool wind of September. Rose wandered off to get them cotton candy.

“You looked so serious staring at the waves,” Rose said.

After spitting pink clouds into the ocean, they took the train to a bookstore where Rose bought runes. She wanted to teach Thora how to be a witch. Lesbian shit. Thora saw a card that said: “Motherhood looks good on you.”

Rose had tried to get The Surgery as soon as it became available to the general public. Her surgeon fumbled it. She got some bizarre infection and died.

Thora gave a eulogy by the Atlantic.

Every morning her mother argued with the doctors.

“My daughter,” she emphasized.

“Is perfectly fine,” the nice man in a white coat said.

Her mother was not going to let what happened to Rose happen to her daughter. She almost told Thora it wasn’t worth the risk, but of course, breedability won out. Her mother wanted lineage. It was easier to pretend, to let others’ reasons drift in and out of her body.

Eli had started playing a game designed by The Company on his phone. A little yellow mouse ran around and stabbed other critters with a javelin. Attention diverted to the screen in his hand, his digital avatar grew more adventurous as Eli fell further into stoic daydreams and lost the web of conversation.

“If I play long enough, I could erase our debt.”

“You’d have to play for a hundred years,” Thora said.

He looked hurt. “I don’t know what else you want me to do, Thora. I’m incredibly

stressed out, I’m exhausted, and neither of us have any money coming in.”

Lorna returned from the cafeteria. “I bought donuts for me and Eli.”

Looking at her mother, Thora saw what she was becoming. She saw the life she so desperately wanted, in all its glory. And she did love her mom, she did.

And feared her, too.

Before the botched surgery, Rose took Thora to the hospital when her lung collapsed. She came to visit and gave Thora news of the outside world. A new Angel Disease had emerged, the third in two years. She told Rose what it was like inside the hospital, to be alone, to wonder why her parents wouldn’t visit, how scary it was to hear about people dying from steel halos growing out of their skulls.

“Just think, one day you’ll be in here for a good reason.”

“Yeah,” Thora said. She texted her mom to say she was doing okay — they were going to do a very routine procedure to repair her lung.

All the other trans girls Thora knew were separatists. She was the only one who kept dating men. Rose told her she was being stupid. Rose lived in an all-trans-girl compound. The girls walked around with their dicks swinging and their tits covered in hickies.

“He’s going to get tired of you.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

“Not as quickly.”

The more cynical the better. Rose drew Raidho as they sat in the glow of the hospital vending machine. Transformation.

In an effort to produce more heterosexuals, The Company began funding comprehensive sex changes. Breedable women were beloved women. This left little room for trans fags and lesbians but they worked hard to pass the het test. Pee in a cup, jack off to the right kind of porn in front of a clinician. Luckily it was easy for Thora; she was straight.

Eli and Thora tried to wait out the rocky recovery with small talk. But it hung above them with butterfly wings and peach-colored mobiles. He did not want a child. He couldn’t afford anything he promised he’d pay for, much less something he didn’t want. Thora wasn’t sure she could afford it either, but felt it coming like an inevitable, cerulean task.

They joked about wanting to visit Disneyland. It’d been bought out by The Company and divided into parks based on the stages of economic theory. They tried to mask that with cute little characters — mice of different varieties. The electric mouse that Eli liked so much, a pink mouse with fairy wings that Thora joked she would get a tattoo of — they all symbolized some sort of participation in use-value.

To save up for this imagined trip, Thora started fixing other girls’ bikes. Rose teased her it was a short drop to being a gold-star lesbian.

“First you’ll fix a girl’s bike, then you’ll fix her sink and then…”

“As hot as that is, I’m not nearly as handy as Eli.”

“I don’t believe that.”

It was half true.

Rose only met Eli twice before she died. Both times they all got drunk together. The second time Rose had tried to kiss Thora in the bathroom.

Eli was handier with some things than others. He was tired. He shouldered phantom responsibility and let the weight split him. She didn’t need to go to Disneyland with him, even if she thought it would be like being broken open in front of everyone, like rose petals flying. She wanted a public romance. Maybe that’s why trans girls liked the apocalypse. It was the only setting where it made sense for trans girls to fall in love forever. It didn’t have to last that long.

“Your mom’s a little kooky,” Eli said, fluffing Thora’s stale hospital pillow. He could tell when Thora was drifting.

“I tried to warn you,” she said, sipping the electric-blue drink everyone told her would make her feel better.

“I just wasn’t expecting it. She’s like…weird.”

Eli didn’t look up from his game. If she were a different girl she would’ve smashed his phone against the wall. Or dropped it out the window. Or sold it online for coffee money. But he loved her and she loved him even if they couldn’t always make sense of the edges.

“She’s been in and out of cults her whole life,” Thora said.

“Was she in one when you were growing up?”

“No. Well. Just the church.”

“Do you consider that a cult?”

It wasn’t like the people at her church were deranged — if anything they were far too normal. A lot of them bought stock in The Company when it first became available. They thought The Company would reinstate serious moral values. When the electric mouse started teaching about the Lascaux cave paintings and disavowing gay men, they were ecstatic. But even then the churchgoers hadn’t brought out any Kool-Aid or advocated for a Second Coming. It was all brick-and-mortar, meat-and-potatoes spirituality. Until her mother started flirting with other

denominations. Cult Mommy.

Eli scooted his chair closer to her bed. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“When we go home I’m going to set up a little canopy above our bed. And I’ll string up those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars you’re always going on about.”

“I’d like that,” she said quietly.

The surgeries would sink her if she wasn’t careful. Eli was only tied to her monetarily in the sense that they shared rent and food. Overall, his grumbling about money was for show. She didn’t ask him for surgery money. She was still paying off the first one even after asking for money online. The Company subsidized The Surgery but not enough; Thora had four credit cards. One of the cards was covered in blue mice wielding tacky lavender swords.

The night she got home from her lung surgery, after spending almost a month in the hospital, she sat in the tub and cried until Rose came over. Rose crawled into the tub alongside her and held Thora against her chest as she sobbed.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

It was as okay as it would ever get. They didn’t say anything the rest of the night. Rose made mint tea and they watched the cartoon about the electric mice they’d both seen a hundred times. The comfort of numb repetition. She sat on the couch feeling her lungs contract and expand. They told her it could happen again. She would never be immune.

Rose got up and made popcorn. Thora rummaged through the cabinet for valerian root. The doctor hadn’t given her enough pain meds to use for sleep. They were running low on everything. She met Eli at the Value Plus Company Drug Store two weeks later. He was looking for lube and she clocked him.

“I’m Eli,” he said. “Do you currently have an ugly trans guy or are applications open?”

“My name’s Thora,” she said, eyeing the candy aisle. “What do you mean?”

“Every hot trans girl has an ugly trans guy boyfriend.”

No one she dated had ever called her a “hot girl.”

They spent that summer wandering the rot of Central Park and fucking in the Rambles. Sometimes he stole her peaches from the market by the docks. He would show up grinning and ask which hand she wanted.

That was the Eli she needed. The one who took her to dinner and strung up twinkle lights. But she had to admit, he was not the kind of man who would make a good father. Their straight shelter in the apocalypse was fragile. Passing meant she could walk around without the fear. When she used to walk around with Rose she always felt angular shards in her lung, worried someone would clock them.

Thora let her mom talk to the doctors. The inane questions Thora needed to ask were funneled through a haze of polite chitchat.

“Will her vagina be self-lubricating?” (Thora knew the answer to that one, of course.)

“Will she have to take any special probiotics?” (She had already researched the best probiotics for neo-vaginas.)

“Will she have to dilate forever?” (This one she didn’t really want her mother to ask.)

“For her face…how long until it…?” (Until it what? Thora wanted to ask.)

“How long until she could have a child?” (The womb was the biggest source of stress. It carried the greatest risk of complications.)

“Could he impregnate her?” (Eli would never get her pregnant. She already tried telling her mother this.)

A fly buzzed near the bathroom. Eli was still playing that stupid game, cursing loudly every few minutes. The pain made it hard to stay conscious. All the pain meds were going to patients with Angel Diseases. She had to make do with what they gave her no matter how many times she rang the bell.

Her body felt like fog. She wondered if Rose had ever felt like that. A girl was less a body of water than a gradual evaporation.

“Are you alright, honey? How do you feel?”

Bad. She felt raw. She knew her mother was going to start asking about grandchildren soon. She knew Eli was going to leave her. She knew she wanted to raise a kid and read The Giving Tree with funny voices and tell her child she thought Shel Silverstein was hot.

Her father read her stories when she was young. He got really into it, making Sherlock Holmes sound like a clueless cuckold. Her mother never listened, she was always in the bathroom fussing with something.

“I feel fine,” Thora said. “I’m just a little thirsty.”

“Alright sweetie. Eli, why don’t you go get our girl some cream soda?”

Eli got up, shot her mom a poisonous look, and stumbled out of the icy hospital room. When he opened the door she could hear a monitor crash and screaming. Another Angel Disease victim flew by on a stretcher, someone growing thorns all over their body.

Before Thora could start estrogen she was asked if she wanted to freeze her sperm. Her response was immediate. No. It was one of the few times in her life someone asked her directly if she wanted kids — perhaps the only time someone asked her if she wanted biological ones. The message was clear: infertility should haunt her, she should want the magical trans uterus. She should do anything for The Company-approved womb since she could afford it. Sort of. She could put it on credit and pay it off for the rest of her life. She wondered if motherhood had to be expected of you in order for you to develop any feelings around it.

She thought about all the MILFs out there. All the times she told someone to fuck her like a woman, to make her afraid of getting pregnant, to all the men she confessed she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother but she wanted to have an abortion.

Now motherhood was something people could expect of her.

Raspberry sunset pooled against Eli’s legs. She wanted him to come closer so she could touch him. She wanted to curl up next to a body. Desperation only made people angrier; they knew you weren’t internalizing anything they said. Thora wasn’t sure what caused his newest mood shift — sometimes he needed a piss-party afternoon. Involuntarily she smiled. He snapped.

“I know you think it’s stupid but I’m trying to provide for you.”

“This is a way to do that?”

Thora meant it sincerely but it came across like an insult. Like she knew better.

“I’m sorry,” Thora said, not entirely sure why she was saying sorry this time. “I just wish you were more present.”

“I can’t be present when we’re falling apart financially. My mom isn’t coming to take care of us.”

“My mom’s going to leave soon. And then I’ll be back at square one. She’s not rich.”

“She’s not rich but she talks to you. My mom and I haven’t spoken in years. Your mom could help. She could do something if you asked her to but you’re too weak to ask.”

“Shut up. It’s not like that,” she said.

“Then what is it like, babe?”

The AC kicked on.

“I’ll ask her if that’s what you want,” Thora said. She didn’t think about the time as a kid when her mom, Sister Lorna then, came home from prayer service with a “holy adornment.” Thora didn't think about the time Sister Lorna took her to the cult meeting and made her child stand in the middle of the congregation to face judgment. She didn’t think about the time her father explained what demons were by saying, “The thing that’s inside you.”

“No, it's fine. Just read your runes,” Eli spat. “I’m sure they’ll say the apocalypse can be averted. They’ll say it’s fine; we just need to love each other.”

Thora watched him leave, clutching his phone tightly by his side. She tried to imagine him in the hospital courtyard, trying to hum one of his favorite punk songs. It was good for him to have a break.

She realized she was dry heaving. Her face felt hot even though she knew in reality there was no way she could be feeling anything other than pain. She was crying, the kind that made her body fight gravity. Her hands wouldn’t move, wouldn’t wipe the water trapped in her face bandages. It was summer. It was supposed to be a happy time. If she could, she would call Rose and cry into the speaker, but Rose would’ve just said, “I told you so.”

Humid light sifted through the window. Flies continued to collect on the sill. If everything went well, she would only stay in the hospital for four more days.

When her mom came in, she tried to stop the flow of tears. She was mildly successful, turning the flood into a noiseless trickle, but it wouldn’t stop completely.

“Honey,” her mom said, setting down her mint tea and pulling up a chair. “Is it the pain?”

Thora nodded.

“Okay sweetie. Okay. Okay, okay, it’s okay.”

Her mom set her hand on Thora’s, the two intertwining tightly.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come last time, but this time I’m here, sweetpea. I’m here.”

She nodded through the tears. They were getting bigger again. Louder. She was gasping.

“It’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop.”

“Oh baby.”

They fumbled like this for a few minutes until her mother held up her hand with an idea.

“Why don’t you read my fortune. With your little runes. Did you bring them?”

“You — hate — them —”

“Will you read my fortune?”

The culty side of her mom was winning out.

Thora nodded through the tears and inched closer to the side of the bed. She fumbled with the menagerie on her bedside table. Pudding cups, decaying lilacs, books, an old issue of Vogue, and her little bag of runes carved into beans. Her mom smiled. She needed someone to hold her even if trust felt like a wobbly tune. It was better just to let it happen.

“I’ll do a three-rune spread.”

Thora took a deep breath and searched the bag for a more certain future. Before she took anything out of the bag, though, Lorna grabbed her hand.

“Do you really want kids? Is that why you’re doing this?”

She realized something about living on two sides of a thicket. In fact, she realized the thicket was less of a concrete divide than a small, porous stream.

“If someone else really wanted one,” Thora said, fiddling with the bag.

It would be different, she thought. It would be so different.

She wished someone wanted her to want one.

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Bookforum, The Nation, LARB, Lux, frieze, Joyland, and The Baffler among other outlets. Find her @emotrophywife. She is currently at work on a novel about conversion therapy.

Edited by Sarah Madges.

The header image is “Sea Change” created by Sarah Madges in collaboration with Ryan Wagahoff.

Memory, a Lacuna

Meg Sykes — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 17:59:51 +0000

My great grandmother Carmen Valenzuela’s Catholic church birth record.

Read the birth record translation

No. 38 Treinta y ocho
Nacimiento de Carmen Valenzuela el 11 de Octubre de 1922 a las 9 p.m.

En la Hacienda San Alberto Durango a las 5 cinco de la tarde del día 13 trece [sic] de Febrero de 1923 mil novecientos veintitrés ante mi Jesús de los Santos Juez del Estado Civil de este lugar: compareció el ciudadano Carlos Valenzuela, nativo y vecino de este lugar de 36 treinta y seis años de edad, casado, y jornalero, y presentó una niña viva nacida en su casa habitación, a las 9 nueve de la noche del día 11 once de octubre de 1922 mil novecientos veintidós y puesolé por nombre: “Carmen,” hija legitima del exponente y de la Señora Marciana Benites nativa de Jimenez Durango: de 28 veintiocho años de edad raza mezclado con Blanco y dio a luz el 6 sexto niña y es nieta por línea paterna del finado Marcelo Valenzuela y Justa González nativa de Huertillas Zacatecas vecina de este lugar y por línea materna del finado Martin Benites y Señora Luz Lopes nativa de Matamoros Laguna Coahuila, vecina de este lugar: viuda. […]

“At the San Alberto Durango Hacienda at 5:50 p.m. on February 13, 1923, nineteen hundred and twenty-three, before my Jesus de los Santos, Civil State Judge of this place: the citizen Carlos Valenzuela, native and resident, appeared from this place, thirty-six years old, married, a day laborer, and presented a living girl born in his home, at 9:00 p.m. on October 11, 1922, nineteen hundred and twenty-two, and gave her the name: “Carmen,” legitimate daughter of the exponent and of Mrs. Marciana Benites, a native of Jimenez, Durango: 28, twenty-eight years old, mixed race with white and gave birth to her sixth, a girl, and is the paternal granddaughter of the late Marcelo Valenzuela and Justa Gonzalez, a native of Huertillas, Zacatecas, a resident of this place, and by maternal line, granddaughter of the late Martin Benites and Mrs. Luz Lopes, a native of Matamoros Laguna, Coahuila, a resident of this place: widow. […]”

My mother and grandmother were born in ‘the land of the lake,’ or La Comarca de la Laguna, a cradle of fertile land between the Sierra Madre mountain ranges in the northern Mexican desert — la Sierra Madre Occidental to the west, and la Sierra Madre Oriental to the East, two mountain mothers, two guardians that keep the land between them a secret. It is where the Nazas and Aguanaval rivers break their pact with the ocean and empty fresh water into the land, flooding the expanse with wide, glassy lakes — a miracle that enabled life in miles of landlocked desert, and made impossible soil fertile for thousands of years.

The Comarca de la Laguna, derived from the word marca, or border, is itself a borderland in El Norte, that spans the states of Durango, my grandmother Angelica’s birthplace, and Coahuila, where my mother was born, land that also borders the United States. It is also a site of colonial atrocity and indigenous resistance, where New Spain established las haciendas laguneras, a robust cotton industry whose economy was built on the encomienda system, a legal system of forced unpaid labor by subjugated indigenous people who had been dispossessed and detribalized through systematic extermination and unspeakable acts of genocide.

The ‘land of the lake,’ a land with rich soil replenished by the flooding rivers, was an ideal location for these haciendas, and for New Spanish colonists to begin their cotton enterprises for the crown. The frequent seasonal flooding was an ideal form of natural irrigation. In the middle of hostile, arid desert, there was a fertile oasis, virgin and unknown. But cotton is a thirsty crop, for which even the most generous irrigation does not satisfy its root. It exhausts the soil of nutrients; the water it consumes leaves behind a kind of salt, stripping the land to such a degree it becomes a wasteland, requiring abandonment and expansion, usually into forests. Eventually, the land of the lake was covered in cotton, a sea of whiteness over the land.

In fantasy, and poetry, we build the memory of the world through metaphor.

My maternal grandmother Angelica was born on one of these haciendas to farm laborers, and the only way I knew to trace my way back to my foremothers was through Catholic missions, known to keep excellent records.

My mother does not remember her birthplace, Torreon; she was a toddler when they fled. No one ever talks about Jesus, her father, or what happened before they lived in Tampico. All they know is that after he, a 36 year old man married my grandmother, a 14 year old girl, they lost contact after a year, and that the silence became so extreme that her brother, my Tio Joel, had to rescue her and her two babies in the middle of the night three years later, but not before punching him in the face.

So I must begin with the land; it is the only record that remains. And that land between them was once flooded by rivers that became lakes, lakes that due to construction, development, agribusiness, resource extraction, are disappearing, if not already gone. But the land itself is a record; all it does is remember.

We all come from the land, eat from it, drink from it, touch its surfaces. The land is memory made material, and keeps record of every single one of us. It is the first object ever to come into existence; anything that exists after it is because of, and part of, the land. Therefore, its formations and materials are objective and cannot be denied. The land, when interpreted, is so undeniable, it trumps false narratives — ice cores, tree rings, the amount of water left. These facts build a sequence — a story. It is why in school, my favorite kind of rock was the sedimentary rock, the layers of time visible in cross-section, time itself made material, the story it told. I loved when sedimentary rock tilted, twisted, warped, the story of centuries, millennia, ages the land itself told. My mothers’ histories may be forgotten, but the Sierra Madres still exist.

Lacuna (disambiguation)
Lacuna (plural lacunas or lacunae) may refer to:

Related to the meaning “gap”
Lacuna (manuscripts), a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or musical work
Great Lacuna, a lacuna of eight leaves in the Codex Regius where there was heroic Old Norse poetry
Lacuna (music), an intentional, extended passage in a musical work during which no notes are played
Scientific lacuna, an area of science that has not been studied but has potential to be studied
Lacuna or accidental gap, in linguistics, a word that does not exist but which would be permitted by the rules of a language
Lacuna, in law, largely overlapping a non liquet (“it is not clear”), a gap (in the law)

In medicine
Lacuna (histology), a small space containing an osteocyte in bone, or chondrocyte in cartilage
Muscular lacuna, a lateral compartment of the thigh
Vascular lacuna, a medial compartment beneath the inguinal ligament
Lacuna magna, the largest of several recesses in the urethra

Other uses
Lacuna model, a tool for unlocking culture differences or missing “gaps” in text Lacunar amnesia, loss of memory about one specific event
Lacunar stroke, in medicine, the most common type of stroke
Lacuna Coil, an Italian hard rock/metal band Lacunary function, an analytic function in mathematics
Lacunarity, a mathematical measure of the extent that a pattern contains gaps
Lacunary polynomial, or sparse polynomial
Petrovsky lacuna, in mathematics

Laguna (disambiguation)

Research is a logical process, and evidence must be objective. Responsible research has little to no speculation. Here are the logical facts, arranged into a problem.

Logic problem:

The Rio Grande is the border between the United States and Mexico.

Land O’ Lakes is a butter company that once depicted an illustration of an indigenous woman with a feather in her hair kneeling in front of a lake as its label.

“The company, founded in 1921 by a group of Minnesota dairy farmers, is phasing in a new design ahead of its 100th anniversary. Instead of the depiction of the woman, some products will be labeled ‘Farmer-Owned’ and feature an illustration of a field and lake, or photographs of its farmers, the company announced.” — “Land O’Lakes Removes Native American Woman From Its Products,” New York Times, September 17, 2020.

In 2020, in response to criticism, the depiction of the indigenous woman was removed from the label. Now, only the land, and the lake, remain.

Rivers empty into the ocean, and the end of the river is its mouth.

Rivers empty into the ocean, except the Naza and Aguanaval rivers, which empty into disappearing lakes.

A lake is a lacuna, and a lacuna is also a gap in memory, an absence, a silence.

If the river is a border, and the end is its mouth, where it empties, it speaks.

The Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Synonyms for gulf.
gulf, noun.

1 our ship sailed east into the gulf. inlet, creek, bight, fjord, estuary, sound, arm of the sea; bay, cove.

2 the ice gave way and a gulf widened slowly. opening, gap, fissure, cleft, split, rift, crevasse, hole, pit, cavity, chasm, abyss, void; ravine, gorge, canyon, gully.

3 there is a growing gulf between the rich and the poor. divergence, contrast, polarity, divide, division, separation, difference, wide area of difference; schism, breach, rift, split, severance, rupture, divorce; chasm, abyss, gap; rare scission.

The Rio Grande speaks into the abyss/void/rupture/divorce/chasm/abyss.

Los Rios Naza and Aguanaval empty into lakes, or lagunas.

The rivers Naza and Aguanaval speak into the land of lakes.

A lacuna is a gap in memory.

“Laguna de Mayrán, Vega de San Pedro, Laguna de Viesca, Laguna del Caimán are long forgotten landscapes, long forgotten names.” — Francisco Valdes-Perezgasga, Orion Magazine

The lakes have disappeared.

At a talk given at the New York Library in 1986, Toni Morrison said, “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding.’”

While I was looking for photos of Torreon, I saw a headline: “Tras 6 años seco, corre agua por el lecho del Río Nazas.” After six years dry, water runs through the River Nazas riverbed, it said. The photo showed a wide, gentle, lazy river, almost like a lake. Also called El Rio de la Laguna, or the river of the lake, it is now contained by the Francisco Zarco dam, constructed in 1968, and has been dry ever since. Once naturally irrigated by seasonal floods, the damming of the rivers has had a devastating effect on the area, forcing the people to use groundwater that is laden with arsenic. The return of the river would replenish the aquifers and solve the arsenic problem, but the dairy industry needs the water to grow alfalfa, the thirstiest crop and single largest user of water, which feeds the cows, which produce the milk. On the United States side, the problem is mirrored — alfalfa consumes 80% of the Colorado River’s water supply, to feed the cows, to produce the milk and meat, and the river is disappearing.

As I read more about it, one fact that should have been obvious stood out — the dry riverbed of the Nazas, the one the water returned to, linked the cities of Torreon, Coahuila and Gomez Palacio, Durango — my mother and grandmother’s birthplaces. After the rains, the dams could not contain the excess, and the floodgates opened. And so the cities were linked again; the land remembered the river’s path, and the river ran and spread like always, into a lake — a river that defies its borders.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and a nonfiction collection while raising her son.

Edited by Patrycja Humienik.

The featured image is a photograph by Patrycja Humienik.

For the Gentleness of Our Leaving

Meg Sykes — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 17:53:08 +0000

—toward Jacob, who took that river’s first new breath
and for Will and for Paco and for Jenny and for Jeff…

I started asking rivers to feed me as a child—literally, with flesh from fish, then figuratively, with flashes of comfort. On the banks of Pacific Northwest tributaries, I learned to anchor my attention in the ceaselessness of a current pushing towards salt. There, while throwing a line to schools of salmon or steelhead, the realities of poverty and addiction back home felt more elsewhere, and it was easier to believe both good food for family and good food for thought waited in my next cast. Like that, I spent a lot of time fixated on running water.

But it only takes two trips to the same stretch of stream (say, just before and then just after an overdue rain) to see how quickly a river can go from tender to terrifying, from seeming to drift gently at your feet with all that it could offer to holding what you believe you need most beyond your riskiest reach. And a river almost always takes more time to return from raging.

In preparation for a craft panel called “Writing the Wounded World: Poets Working from and against Eco-Grief,” I choose to return to an Arkansas stream that I’ve been avoiding. One transplanted suffering or another I am carrying around has changed the stream’s banks from a space of meditative reconnection and release into an unpleasant mirror of my own inner fracturing—of feeling, as Li-Young Lee once put in a poem, “dispersed, though in one body,/ claimed by rabble cares and the need to sleep.”

Like many in struggle will do from time to time, rather than accepting the difficulty of my surroundings—in this case, a Southern stream’s warmwater startle of poisonous snakes and primitive gar—I have been staying away. I have been forgetting how the landscapes that ground me often do so without my fully trusting why. Sometimes, all you have to do is stumble or drag your feet toward a familiar place of relief. Sometimes, all you have to do is return…

I have been what I would call healed by several streams. But each healing that I’ve experienced from Vermont has turned the power of running water into a greater mystery for me. One Vermont river-healing didn’t even feel like a healing when it was happening.

I was first in Vermont during a four-week September residency—to rise and write and revise while surrounded by other inspiring writers and visual artists. What’s more, I would eat every meal and write or change every word and sleep every night with a river right outside my window.

Between midday bouts of creating, a handful of us had started strolling to a nearby swimming hole to escape the swelter of late summer. Then someone learned of a chilly spring-fed stream with plunge pools just beyond our normal walking range. So, one day, we crammed into the few cars available, and I spent that particular afternoon with artists showing me how to receive a glorious massage from the right-sized riffle or miniature waterfall. If you can find a roughly body-height drop in a river with rocks to safely wedge yourself steady, you can feel that river’s travel written along your entire body. If the day is hot enough or the water cool enough, your breath will also gain a new story. The story I received that day was about the grace of a togetherness you don’t see coming. After decades of wading and fishing and meditating through streams, there I was, almost by accident, with beautiful not-quite strangers teaching me a whole other way to let a river carry me.

But then the softness of Vermont was punctured by another afternoon, one I spent alone with a different river toward the end of the residency. That day began with a long and difficult route I’d planned for fishing. That day, the pleasant pulls on my attention and warm admissions of connection were slowly then suddenly replaced by nature’s other necessary insight: unbounded indifference.

For years I’d told myself that my time with streams was deepened by a distinction from my writing practice, that I never wrote while on a river, soothed by the ways running water seemed to diminish my traction on the past, weaving my focus into the falling present instead. When I was planning my route to this other Vermont river—which I purposefully made long and difficult to gain more space to fish back from—I imagined it as a gift of sorts, for all the writing I’d been doing back in my studio, day after day, only swimming with new friends but resisting the urge to grab my flyrod to keep the words coming.

Then I trudged the multiple miles down what ended up being a harrowing highway and an oddly named backroad that I swore I’d heard before. Along the way I tracked through ominous clouds of insects, pieces of putrefying roadkill, and other strange signs that needled a sensitivity dredged up by the weeks of unobstructed writing. The brutal heaviness of the sun also seemed determined to wring my body more defenseless with every step.

And once I arrived at the river, what waited for me there was the most intimate conversation I’ve ever had with loneliness, as the meanings I’d built around my own wounded history were stripped away by the rawness of nature’s unreflecting face.

I scribbled notes the entire time—in part to interrupt the unwanted immediacy, in part to reach for understanding all that loneliness was trying to tell me. As the river did nothing but continue, perhaps the hardest thing I heard loneliness saying that day was Trust me.

When I finally returned, the artists I’d grown closest to could read a kind of horror on my face—that I was struggling to get my breath back. They sat with me. They let me stay silent. They let me weep. Their hands confirmed from time to time that my bewildered body was indeed back with them. Amen.

Two summers later, when a writers’ conference brought me back to Vermont, I hadn’t been in or near very much running water since, and I was growing afraid that I’d somehow lost my way to the single healthiest environment of my life.

I’m weaving my truck through the Ozarks. This hilly range has soft inclines that can too easily obscure their ancient age from a Washington-born vantage like mine. My literacy of the horizon was shaped by staggering peaks of The Cascades and The Olympians, by looming volcanoes that could demand without warning the entire region’s full attention with smoky reminders of their potential for catastrophe.

As I drive, I catch an episode of Hidden Brain on the radio. The segment I’m hearing is about “wild awe,” and Shankar Vedantam’s guest, Dacher Keltner, is saying that wild awe occurs when we encounter a mystery too vast to perceive with our current knowledge of nature. Such awe requires our accommodation, which can be harrowing—that feeling of rearranging your structures of understanding to make sense of the awesomeness before you.

I pull up to the banks of the Arkansas stream, and something clenched inside me gives…

I spent the opening August days of the Vermont conference letting it slip to other writers that I was maybe hoping and also more than a little fearful to make my way to a river during our stay there—and could I maybe have some help to go for a brief swim, maybe look for a miniature waterfall if we had the chance, just to know that I could tolerate a river’s full holding again, to know running water returning my breath.

As it turned out, there was already a well-established tradition of conference-goers visiting a river just a short drive away. And so, I piled in with the handful of writers who had decided to spend their mid-conference break swimming to reset the intensity of the writing and the heat.

Much of the day that unfolded with those writers still feels buffered by a gauzy disbelief at the numinous strands of vulnerability and curiosity and play that kept us both together and apart from moment to moment. Even the drive there was setting some kind of wonder in motion.

With limited space, a few of us had squeezed side-by-side in the trunk of a writer’s hatchback. Because we sat facing backwards, looking through the vehicle’s large rear-window, our view was of the rural road pulling its yellow hashes away from us. A wave not unlike motion sickness started to challenge our trust in staying very long with that perspective.

Something about the challenge also maybe seemed restorative—or somebody wanted to call it that, if only to help us pass the drive. Societal messaging would have us believe that we live strapped forward to time, responsible for predicting and capitalizing on all that’s headed our way (and feeling ashamed when we don’t or cannot). But that day’s backwards travel was more aligned with how we really move through life—time pulling experience from us, moments and people added to the stream of our constantly becoming the past.

Then someone confessed how much they were struggling to actually see the occasional joggers and bikers we kept passing. Faces and forms sprung from a first clarity that felt immediately washed away as each figure entered the obscurity of their growing distance from us. Someone called the feeling sad, and then someone else or that same someone, wanting a different name for sadness, called it forgetting.

When the car finally stopped at the river and our difficult new sense of movement did not relieve, we tried hugging each other to break the spell.

“Reading the water” is what anglers call the practice of divining a river’s underwater drama by interpreting what can be seen at its surface: the speed of a floating leaf, color changes created by shadow or depth, boils in the stream’s current as water works around a submerged log, etc. This visual information, when synced with feedback from countless hours of angling’s trials and errors, becomes a foil to imagining invisible fish lying in hiding or tracking something to eat.

It’s what I’m doing now at the Arkansas stream, even though I already know I will push through the first several hundred yards of river, wading for the riffles and pools that past experience has taught me will contain more promising fish. The water’s allure on my attention is immediate, though, and keeps me from rushing by for the moment.

I’ve read so much water in my life it feels like an instinct I’ve always had. Turning that instinct off seems as likely as disregarding what a tree’s leaves can say about the seasons at a glance. Even while standing before an urban spillway or agricultural ditch, pieces of water I know have nothing with scales swimming below, I will catch myself looking where impossible fish could hold in another world…

After the cars had all unloaded at the Vermont river, I held somewhere between those writers who took out books in the inviting shade and those who stripped down to swimwear before entering the water. It took me a few beats and then a short leap from an overhang and a brief swim upstream to find my initial waves of relief. In a small bend where the river picked up just enough current to seem heavy, I spent several minutes with a fellow writer (whom I’d learned earlier was also an angler and so could empathize with the odd sensation of splashing straight into a riffle—something you’d never do while stalking fish), showing them a shy version of the massage technique that the residency artists had taught me. We took turns finding our footing, holding hands as necessary, to feel the river kneading at the tension in our shoulders.

Then I heard whoops and hollers, and the garbled word “waterfall” came from further upstream, where some other writers were waving their arms to get our attention. I made my way along the slick river-stones to learn they had discovered a crop of large rocks that broke the current into multiple braids. One braid of stream plunged more dramatically than the rest, creating a perfect scoop in the flow for someone to rest against.

My skin and hair had dried some, which intensified the gasp and grin of easing my body back into the cool hands of the stream. And I lingered there until I was convinced, I had rejoined the one long heave of running water. Then I watched as the other writers took turns receiving their own massages, expressions lit with feeling yourself rippled by a river’s defiance of start or finish.

Then one writer filled their lungs and went face first, playfully ducking their back below the river’s rush. Just as the clock in my head sounded with real worry, they broke the surface and exclaimed, “You can breathe under here!” We were writers. We could hear their voice caught in the familiar thrill of translating individual joy into group resonance. Yes, weren’t we all receiving a kind of breath? But no, they insisted, they’d found a little space behind the river, between water and rock, where you could just fit the front of your face and breathe.

And so, we took new turns, daring ourselves to find the underwater way to draw breath, the trust of which seemed to require opening the eyes against a roar that shouted otherwise to your senses. What kind of air was this that we were taking into our lungs now?

Then another writer perched on an upstream boulder to take in the high view of a face rising with astonishment. But what they saw beneath was the river fanning the torso of each water-breather into one more miracle we maybe didn’t want the language for, so nobody really tried beyond a deep sighing.

Then another writer found this nearly invisible dip in the limestone of the nearby shallows, a slight bowl that seemed a minor mirror to our almost waterfall. And when they plopped down into it to show those of us who couldn’t yet see, the grandeur of their motion added our laughter to the day.

As the afternoon aged, we went on like that, returning to the wonder-cave or playing sillier to soften the ending we had to face once the awe had begun. Some of us could only take a single new breath. Some of us went under over and over. Nobody rose with the same expression. We each took as many tries as needed and then waited until our spell waned enough to leave it.

One by one but also all together, we started moving downstream toward the vehicles. Perhaps as a kind of mercy for the longing already growing within us, someone mentioned what we had to accept about the river: we would never find that cave again. Even if we could return a hundred times, seasonal floods would shift a flow-altering stone or water levels would drop too low to ever recreate the breath we were departing. And maybe that was the blessing. We each had places to go and be present. A desire to be impossibly back would not serve us, nor would convincing others they should have been somewhere else they could not. But we carried in our lungs a shimmery faith in the next strange breath we might drop inside of, if only we dared or lingered or played enough to witness something rewriting the distrust in our bodies.

We floated the last stretch of river with our bellies up, facing backwards, mostly letting a stream’s meander carry us without much effort, feet dimpling the scenery drifting by. I started a quiet prayer for what we may have planted in that cave, and for the gentleness of our leaving—that it might save us from hurting to clutch the clarity that must pass away.

While some rivers will show you, either readily or in time, a being that lies underneath, all rivers keep parts of themselves flexing beyond our sight. I return to running water to know what a life spent looking again will sometimes reveal, but also to accept what drifts in the margins of an always incomplete wonder. Today that wonder includes but is not limited or even mostly defined by my fear of—what—the language I’ve been missing for belonging?

Before I start fishing my Arkansas stream to fully break the dry spell, I turn around to make a mental note of the path I’ll need at the end of this day. But the way is bordered by thick bushes and riparian trees that obscure the truck parked somewhere I can’t see. Bless the river once more for making it harder for me to stare off towards where it is I think I am heading, nudging my attention back inside the banks of where I am.

Geffrey Davis is the author of three books of poems, most recently One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024). His second collection, Night Angler, won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and his debut, Revising the Storm, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Davis teaches with the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation and with The Rainier Writing Workshop. He also serves as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Edited by Patrycja Humienik.

The featured image is a photograph by Patrycja Humienik.

SAMBATYON

Meg Sykes — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 17:51:09 +0000

It will come that every living creature which swarms in every place where the river goes, will live. And there will be very many fish, for these waters go there and the others become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes. —Ezekiel 47:9

It will come that every living creature which swarms in every place where
the river goes, will live. And there will be very many fish, for these waters
go there and the others become fresh; so everything will live where the
river goes. —Ezekiel 47:9

There is a river, lost or hidden, that is impossible to pass six days each week. The force of its waters hurls stones. Or the river is a river of stones, a torrent of stones and sand. Maybe it is a volcano, some say, unable to imagine this river. Maybe it is a spring.

Some say the river is as wide as a bow can shoot an arrow. Others say it is many miles across, seventeen, and that its waters both cure disease and throw stones as tall as a tower. That on the day it does not flow it resembles an inland sea, a sea of snow, a sea of sand. That if one gathers and bottles some of this sand, the sand will be restless for six days each week, agitating itself against the glass every day but one.

The stones in this river of stones or this river of water, can be heard a half-day away and sound like a storm, like an ocean, like the roar of waves, like the howl of wind over water. But one day a week the river is quiet, and does not flow. Certain fish, on that day, draw close to the shore, and refuse to swim. They—like the sand, like the water—are quiet and rest.

There are a people, lost or hidden, that will not cross this river. They cannot six days a week. They will not on the one day they could.

Some say it is the lost tribes of Israel, all ten, or four, who live on the other side of the river. That the river is in Persia, in India, in Ethiopia. That it is south of the Caspian sea. That the lost Jews are in Pakistan, in China, in Syria, in Russia. That they are warriors of tremendous height.

Some medieval Germans believed a legendary Jewish nation of “Red Jews” lived beyond this river. Red-bearded and red-clothed warriors with flushed red faces who would eventually invade Europe and threaten Christianity during the tribulations near the end of the world.

Others believed that across the river are the descendants of Moses himself. That during Babylonian captivity, it was demanded of them to stand before Babylon’s sacred statues and perform the songs the Israelites used to sing in their now destroyed Temple. The children of Moses, instead, so they could not play their own harps, cut off their own thumbs. Many of these Israelite priests were slaughtered, their bodies heaped in mounds. But a cloud descended and a pillar of fire guided the survivors to a place where this river, called Sambatyon, could be stretched around them.

In Portugal, the secret Jews of Lisbon were alerted each Friday afternoon—by a man walking through the city holding up a glass vessel of jumping sand and stones—that the Sabbath was coming. A sign for the converso Jews, the Jews hiding as Christians, to jump up and close their shops. These were not the lost Jews. Not those lost Jews.

Roman senator and provincial governor of Judea, Turnus Rufus the Evil, once asked Rabbi Akiva how do you know which day is the Sabbath? Maybe it’s another day. Reb Akiva replied: the River Sambatyon. We rest when it rests. Thus, the Jews on the other side of the Sambatyon will not cross it on the day that it is quiet. For they too must rest.

In Ancient times, the Sabbath started before the Sabbath started. Three blasts of the shofar were followed by the lighting of the Sabbath candles, the sun not yet set. Everyone would then wait— the time it took to roast a small fish—before three more shofar blasts sanctified time. Only when three stars appeared in the sky the following night would time move forward again.

“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.” said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, author of The Sabbath.

“We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass” said the descendent of a long and storied line of rabbis on both sides of his family, Karl Marx.

The time of the soul is not the time of the calendar. The Jewish New Year does not begin at the beginning of the year but on the new moon at the beginning of the seventh month. The calendar does not start anew, the soul does.

The first day of the seventh month is also called a day of rest. But during this day Jews leave their cities to go to a river. They go to a river to perform Tashlich, the throwing of breadcrumbs into the water, the release of one’s transgressions and regrets. They leave the city to do this because in the Middle Ages the custom of Tashlich was used to accuse Jews of casting a spell over the water, even poisoning it through incantation.

The word ‘to rest’ in Biblical Hebrew, shavat, gives rise in the Middle Ages to the word shevitah, referring to the things one must refrain from in order to rest. Shevitah in modern Hebrew has now also come to mean “to go on strike.”

There is a mandate in the Bible that comes even before the mandate to rest each week. Shmita. Shmita occurs every seventh year as a sabbath for the land.

“Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave, the beasts of the field may eat. In like manner you shall do with your vineyard and your olive grove.”

Shmita was of such importance that the Prophet Jeremiah declared that the exile of the Israelites was because of this very thing, their regular violation of shmita. Moses Maimonides agreed. The four grave things that could cause exile were idolatry, murder, incest, and the violation of shmita.

Some say the laws of shmita only apply to those living in Israel. And yet when significant numbers of Jews began to settle there again in the 19th century, rabbinical authorities came up with a cheat, heter mechira, where Jews could sell their land, for the length of the shmita year, to non-Jews, and then work the land as employees. In other words, the land never rested. In other words, the poor of the people did not eat what lie fallow in this land. In other words, the beasts of the never-rewilded field did not eat from the never-resting land.

1.3 billion cubic meters of water used to flow through the lower Jordan River, but now it is only 2% of that. The majority of what remains is diverted for human use by Israel, Syria and Jordan, each taking what they can before the other. The Six Day War was partly started over this battle. Untreated sewage and chemicals from agricultural fertilizer have decimated its ecosystem.

Some say there are a people trapped behind the west bank of this river. Trapped yet prohibited from accessing it. From accessing it or fresh water springs. That these people are not allowed to drill new water wells or deepen existing ones. That even the collection of rainwater is controlled by another there, their own cisterns often destroyed as punishment. That hundreds of these communities have no access to running water. That they endure somehow, improbably, by consuming a mere 73% of the recommended daily water minimum. Yet their neighbors, living sometimes in communities that sit side by side with theirs, consume four times more than this.

Which came first, the unquenchable thirst or the river of stones?

Reb Palache of Oruro, in the Hebrew year 5831, gathered his followers along the banks of the Kachi Mayu, on the new moon of the seventh month. A shmita year. For the six years before they anticipate it. They know debts will be forgiven this year, and yet some will suffer who were owed a great deal. They know others have experienced crop spoilage and will also need to be helped through the year ahead, but they have planned and imagined for this day. For all of this. For years now. Their neighbors too know of their ways. Some connect them to their own practices—of rotation of crops in seven-year cycles.

Tell us the story of the return of the waters, they ask him. He has told them before of Joseph’s dream, of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. How he helped, not his own people, but the Egyptians, filling their granaries in anticipation. Peoples of every sort came from around the region, including his own family, his own brothers, to Egypt when they needed food. And for the six years before the shmita, Reb Palache’s community feeds its neighbors, invites them to their fields and their table, goes to theirs.

But he knows this is the result not the cause of the return of the waters. That the boundless thirst had to be broken. That it wasn’t rest that returned them to rest. But something else.

Tell us of the strike, they say. But his mind is elsewhere, his eyes briefly blinded by a flash of sun. A flash of sun glinting off an iridescent scale, of a fish briefly soaring out of the water.

Reb Soomekh of Jisr az-Zarqa, in the Hebrew year 5796, had gathered her followers along the banks of the Nahal Taninim, on the new moon of the seventh month. A shmita year. Their first attempt at an enactment of a new ritual, a shmita seder, a mere three years since the end of the shevitah, the strike.

It had been too soon. Too soon for a shared ritual, the land so newly federated. Yes, they had joined the strike, improbably started by one remarkable woman, Sheikha Mariam of Musmus. But even as they came together for the seder, it was as if they were on opposite sides of the river. They could not share their stories, they could not mourn their respective dead together.

This year, the Hebrew year 5803, a shmita year once again, their second shmita seder, they meet closer to Musmus, along the banks of the estuary of the Kishon river, now called Nahr el-Mokatta once again. They keep their distance from the water which still can result in chemical burns, despite the closing of the factories nearly a decade ago. Yet the great cormorants are returning, their astonishing green-blue eyes watching them.

The six cups on the seder plate represent the six elements of the shmita year. They decide this year to focus on the sixth, on otzar, The Commons. The otzar cup holds several dates and is surrounded by many more, split and opened, lying among honey-soaked almonds and pistachios. This isn’t the first time they’ve shared rituals in their respective traditions since the first shmita. And yet it is stilted still. Reb Soomekh and Sheikha Mariam have decided in advance there will be no speaking this year. Everyone will stuff an opened date for another. They will sing together, wordless melodies. They will be together, cup by cup, without words.

It is the new moon, on the first day of the seventh month, of the Hebrew year 5845. A shmita year. Rehabiah ben Eliezer and his kinsmen have gathered, as they do every week, at the banks of the river, each time it stops. But this isn’t merely the weekly shavat, for them and the waters both. Nor is it merely the restoration they seek on the seventh month each year; nor the renewal of shmita every seven. This year is the Jubilee year, the seventh cycle of shmita, the seventh cycle of shmita since the strike.

There are no leaders, there are no followers among them. And yet it is often Rehabiah who they ask to speak. They recline on their sides by the water, so impossibly still. Rehabiah strokes his red beard as he drags his hand in the water which does not rush against it. He takes in the silence, which seems so loud after the roar of the last six days, the last six years, the last forty-eight. They want his stories but he is tired, not by the number of times they've been told, but of stories at all. And the ways they direct and point and move and flow.

His fingertips find the top of a rock in the water, and beside it a Sabbatian fish floating without aim. At first Rehabiah places his four fingers to one side of the fish, and his thumb to the other, holding it, grasping it, if lightly; feeling its alien coolness, so different from the ruddiness of his people. He tucks his thumb across his palm, thinking of his thumbless ancestors, thinking of what a hand might be for if it cannot grab. His fingers dangle in the water like fronds of lake grass, the fish bumping up against them without purpose, here and there and here again.

He looks across this river, which looks now like a lake, or an inland sea. He looks across the bodies of his now sleeping brethren, across the body of water with nowhere to be. He lets his mind travel across it. He feels his hand become cool like the fish, and he lets it become cooler still. He thinks of the six years they planned for this, what they might do in the six years after. He reels his mind back in, to his hand, to the fish, to the river they will never cross. And he says to no one: release, shmita means 'release.'

David Naimon is the host of the literary podcast Between the Covers and co-author with Ursula K. Le Guin of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, a finalist for the Hugo Award and winner of the 2019 Locus Award in nonfiction. His writing can be found in Orion, AGNI, Boulevard, Black Warrior Review and elsewhere, has received a Pushcart prize, been reprinted in Best Spiritual Literature and The Best Small Fictions and been cited in Best American Mystery & Suspense, Best American Travel Writing and Best American Essays.

Edited by Patrycja Humienik.

The featured image is a photograph by Patrycja Humienik.

How Do You Make It Work?

Meg Sykes — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 17:32:24 +0000

A friend was putting together an issue for an online magazine. The theme: “work.”
“All I do is write about work for an agency questioning whether people can work,” I told them.
We agreed I’d submit something. I sent an email that I’ve now given a title:

How Do You Make It Work?

I’m writing this much later than I should be, in part, because I’ve just had another birthday, and as I age, I become more reluctant to do more than one job. In school, I had a full-time job, up to three gigs that recurred from regularly to rarely, plus a full-time course load. I do not wish this on anyone, and how normal this has become at present is a disgrace.

Now, middle-aged and far less able to run purely on spite, my one job is to decide who has the ability to do at least one job: I make disability determinations for the Social Security Administration.

I wish Studs Terkel were still alive, and could tell you about this work, tell the stories of the lives of others in the most humanizing way, and to let the decency of folks speak for itself. Instead, I only have my voice, to tell stories of false starts at dignity and hard stops at livelihood due to disease, injury, and trauma. All I’ve had to contend with is the question of how to live well when you start off with nothing. The people asking me for help in my capacity as a government agent are trying to make do with even less.

People even older than me, despite having had to work much, much less, would yell things like “Get a job!” instead of making any earnest attempt to articulate why they’re annoyed, but the cranks in my cohort have been fond of telling others to “learn to code.” These are people with access, born in the right time and place, lucky enough to have supportive families — or at least their supportive finances — and to have avoided major bodily and psychic injury. With two of each limb, a pair of ears and eyes, intact executive function, an immune system not too busy attacking itself, few pathogens of consequence, and relatively dormant ghosts in their heads, “learn to code” could very well seem like sound advice to these ghouls.

Do they offer the same panacea, to “learn to code,” for people earning second-percentile scores on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale for matrix reasoning, block design, working memory, or processing speed? What would happen if they were to experience crisis themselves? Do they expect to pull their own weight, if, after a traumatic brain injury or stroke, they can no longer organize thoughts or schedules, or else develop an entirely new personality? Do they have someone prepared to take dictation should multiple sclerosis progress to the point that their hands and feet contract and curl involuntarily when they’re stressed, and their fingers can no longer be coerced into using a keyboard?

What happens when you cannot work for a living? Do you have family to support, stuck in a place that used to have jobs and a downtown, churches, and lawns, before the local government got suckered into giving tax breaks to the company that built the now-dead mall? Do you have enough wealth to pay for the healthcare you need to manage your chronic illness now that you’re out of work and out of coverage from whatever plan the invisible hand determined was best for you — according to your employer?

Are you able to pay for food without thinking about what it costs, without entertaining plans to five-finger-discount Kroger’s “Family of Companies,” which posted $45.2 billion in profit for the first quarter of 2023? Do you really think that tens of billions in profits would suffer if you walked out without paying for the razor cartridges in your basket?

And what if you’re sick forever?

Although some can ask for help without prompting, such moral value is assigned to work that folks often come to me unable to tell their stories because of their feelings of worthlessness and shame. Still, every one of us can talk about the minutiae of our exhausting jobs in exhaustive detail, so asking what someone used to do for a living is typically my only hope of coaxing such people to talk, in many instances for the first time, about why they cannot work. They have to explain their former jobs, sometimes hated, sometimes beloved, but without which, they’re fucked — and frequently they cry, because they are aware of this last fact. They must share details with a stranger otherwise only described to their doctors (although increasingly instead to nurses, physician assistants, naturopaths, psychics, faith healers, and other snake-oil salespersons), about why they can no longer do what had given them some sense of worth. Some have never been able to get or keep jobs because of voices that tell them to do things, or because a childhood of serial abuse has caused them to second- and third-guess themselves silent, or because their blood disorder causes sheer pain for a few days every two to three months, requiring days in hospital beds receiving morphine and transfusions. Those are harder to convince to talk. Still, some don’t want to talk to me at all, because although this is all conducted privately, this process is not kind and the results are hardly rewarding.

Regardless of whether their work exists anymore, people often must pretend that the jobs are still there, and then prove they cannot do them. It doesn’t matter that the manufacturing centers of the United States are referred to as the Rust Belt, that their job has been shipped somewhere that does not require the board or their boss to abide minimum wage, child-labor, or occupational health-and-safety standards (and that has a much cheaper labor pool than Missouri!). It doesn’t matter that tech and greed continue to erase work for human beings; these human beings still have to show that they can’t perform their now-imaginary former job’s tasks. Compounding the humiliation, if the stranger evaluating their case selects them for severe destitution by denying their claim rather than marginal subsistence by awarding their claim, these humans are presented nonsensical rationale supported by a Department of Labor publication that hasn’t been updated since 1991, and the testimony of professional witnesses relying simply on their “professional experience.” The results are often absurd, and perhaps the spirit of 1991 has a laugh knowing someone was denied because they are not too sick to be a microfilm mounter, elevator operator, dowel inspector, or addresser.

All day at work, it’s pain and humiliation — largely that of others — and knowing that the folks who I am able to help remain in poverty regardless. Feel free to remind your dad next Thanksgiving that the notion that anyone bilks the system is belied by the fact that the average payment for disability insurance benefits is less than $1,400 a month, with an additional $600 or so for whoever qualifies for supplemental security income. Depending on your locality, it might just cover rent — but not rent and food, clothing, or medical care, or transportation to medical care. Luxuries like childcare, recreation, and travel are out of the question. No one on the rolls compares to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” bogeyman. That idea belongs in the same heap as “learn to code.”

Yet, while the job can be awful and seemingly futile at times, some of the people I get to meet will have better health coverage and access to care than they would otherwise, and some will become eligible for contingent benefits from their home state or city to assist with stable housing, home upkeep, or benefits for their children. I have my hand on the scale now, so I can jump through fewer hoops, save some time otherwise wasted on smoke and mirrors, and extend some help to people in need.

Though I’ve reached hair-level with the glass ceiling for agency jobs available to my social class, and — unless the US abolishes tuition or the government adopts an employee tuition-reimbursement program — I cannot afford any more education, the pay is fine. I only have to work one job, which I never saw coming. I don’t have to rely on my shoplifting expertise anymore and can eat what I want. I get to question and discuss policy from within, take bureaucrats to task, support my colleagues in the three unions with members in the agency, and do work that doesn’t involve distributing more wealth to some rich, megalomaniac failson.

But I could use more collaborators.

Lester Tibbett is a false name used by a real person to protect them from retaliation by their employer, the United States government. They spend their working hours trying to apply regulations in a way that benefits the people asking them for help, and convincing doctors, lawyers, and judges to do the same. As a child, Lester wanted to grow up to be a luthier.

Edited by Sarah Madges.

The header image was created from the poster "It works ...when you can't / U.S. Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, Social Security Administration" (1965), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. The image adjascent to the author's bio is "Causmonauts Heaven" by SKoparov.