Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 120 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don’t know. I won’t know them, but I’ll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you’ll be so sorry you’ll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing. Maybe you can tell me what those two girls are doing in that field, what they’re watching for. If they’re waiting for something to arrive or to leave. Don’t tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn’t. The cover keeps changing every time I look at it, and now the field is frazzled with animals, mountain dogs and mice and a tiger tilling the field with its tail. Under the sofa, in that dark rind of space where the mice shit and breed and eat their babies, I slide out the book I stole from her, consider feeding it page by page to your holes, erasing those two girls from the field that’s waiting to be sown with their bones. But always, I keep it, something I know she misses, an absence like a field, growing until it surrounds you. Something I know she’ll return for. DAUGHTER Back to Ben The holes behaved like newborns, mouths open wide enough to swallow our hips, crying all night until the neighbors asked if we were running some kind of illegal orphanage, trafficking sound from the ground. My mother came out with a BB gun and shot them each in the mouth, but they spat the bullets back out and vacuumed the gun right out of her hands, inhaling her arms up to the elbows. My tail, too, was colicky, its stripes steel-bright with sweat. It flicked out in the night, upright between my knees. It was honing itself, rubbing against the whetstone of my bedroom wall. Only stilled when I promised to steer it like a spear, tell it who to stitch through. Your ama is baiting us, Ben said. She’s getting ready to bury someone. I said that the holes would tell me what to do, that they were already sirening, an orchestra of mouths warning me. The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross- legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My father, god of water, could make anything grow. Before my brother and I were born, he went to school to major in rain. His favorite things were irrigation systems and trenches and hoses—all the ways water could immigrate. What he knew about thirst was to outsource it. Irrigation is surgery. Like threading veins through a body, he said, and demonstrated with his arms how to shovel through anything, how to break up the dirt that’s well-versed in thirst. When my mother said, I want this world waterless, he laughed and said she was prejudiced against rivers, alive or dry, because she’d nearly been drowned in one. But he wasn’t afraid of rivers. He ran them. Back then, he used to tell my mother: I’ll be a god syringing rivers into deserts, injecting lakes into droughtland, seducing salt out of seawater. Then my brother was born and he dropped out of school, taking a job moving two-by-fours at a construction site. Work that wrung all the water from his body. I came second, a daughter shaped like floodwater, and by then he was coming home late every day, shimmying off his sweat, watering the carpet until it grew past my ankles. I ducked under the kitchen table, fleeing the radius of his rain, trimming the carpet down with a pair of eyebrow scissors. When he left the room to shower for hours, spending so long in the bathroom I wondered if he’d become water and gone down the drain too, I crawled where he’d rained all over the floor, touching my tongue to his sweat, divining where his body had been based on taste. He’d been at the beach, I told my brother, and he’d kidnapped all the salt from the sea, holding it hostage here. After work, my father irrigated our apartment building’s shared courtyard, scooping trenches too straight to be veins. When it rains, he said, the water won’t flood. It’ll be outsourced. I asked him how he knew where the water had to go, and he pointed at a pack of bushes with finger-shaped flowers. Water follows want, he said. If the body is really mostly water, I asked, then how come it can burn? My father said something about parts and sums: how water is a part and the body is the sum, but I didn’t want to do the math and ran back inside.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  I have determined to reply simply and without ambiguity, and I judge that I owe that work to God and the Church, nor at the age to which I have arrived, do I fear either exile or other dangers." On August 23 of the same year, Calvin expressed his gratification with this answer and wrote: "I entreat you to discharge, as soon as you can, the debt which you acknowledge you owe to God and the Church." He adds with undue severity: "If this warning, like a cock crowing rather late and out of season, do not awaken you, all will cry out with justice that you are a sluggard. Farewell, most distinguished sir, whom I venerate from the heart." In another letter of Aug. 3, 1557, he complains of the silence of three years and apologizes for the severity of his last letter, but urges him again to come out, like a man, and to refute the charge of slavish timidity. "I do not think," he says, "you need to be reminded by many words, how necessary it is for you to hasten to wipe out this blot from your character." He proposes that Melanchthon should induce the Lutheran princes to convene a peaceful conference of both parties at Strassburg, or Tübingen, or Heidelberg, or Frankfurt, and attend the conference in person with some pious, upright, and moderate men. "If you class me," he concludes, "in the number of such men, no necessity, however pressing, will prevent me from putting up this as my chief vow, that before the Lord gather us into his heavenly kingdom I may yet be permitted to enjoy on earth, a most delightful interview with you, and feel some alleviation of my grief by deploring along with you the evils which we cannot remedy." In his last extant letter to Melanchthon, dated Nov. 19, 1558, Calvin alludes once more to the eucharistic controversy, but in a very gentle spirit, assuring him that he will never allow anything to alienate his mind "from that holy friendship and respect which I have vowed to you .... Whatever may happen, let us cultivate with sincerity a fraternal affection towards each other, the ties of which no wiles of Satan shall ever burst asunder."

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Why hide such a pretty face?” Cecily found this hilarious, or at least pretended to. She laughed with the desperate air of someone who didn’t want the conversation to turn uninteresting lest you leave her alone with no one to talk to. Yale spotted Gloria, Charlie’s reporter with all the earrings, and waved her over. “Gloria went to Northwestern,” he said, and the two women started talking, and within a minute Yale and Julian were making their escape. “Bathroom,” Julian whispered right behind Yale’s ear, and it didn’t sound like such a bad idea. There was a lot of beer in his bladder. The bathroom was empty. Julian, instead of heading into one of the two stalls, splashed water on his face and then stood there as if he expected to chat. He twisted his forelock. When Julian went bald someday, he’d have to find something else to do with his hands. Yale said, “That woman is not exactly my boss, but she’s not not my boss.” “She didn’t seem so bad.” Part of Julian’s beauty was the way he looked at you. If you stared at the ground, you’d find that Julian had ducked down and was catching your eye from below, as if to pull you back up again. He would rub his fingers along his own ear and blush at you, and that was oddly beautiful as well. Yale headed into a stall. No urinals here, thankfully. Julian’s voice: “Have you ever seen a snake dancer?” “A charmer? With a basket?” “No. Usually they’re women, like belly dancers, but they let a python crawl all over them when they’re dancing. Anyway, Club Baths is bringing in a guy, like this bodybuilder guy, who does snake dancing.” Yale laughed as he zipped his fly. “What could possibly go wrong?” “You’re no fun!” “Sorry. That’s probably the safest thing going on there.” Yale came out and washed his hands. Julian looked in the mirror. “You wouldn’t mind if they all closed.” “Honestly, Julian—yeah, I think it might be for the best. For a while. I don’t blame them for everything the way some people do, but they sure as hell haven’t helped. And it’s not about shame or regression or anything else. It’s just, like, if there were a salmonella outbreak at a restaurant, you wouldn’t keep eating there, right?” Julian shook his head. He didn’t seem inclined to leave the bathroom. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’ve heard more condom propaganda there than anywhere else. You’re just parroting Charlie.” “Charlie’s right about some stuff.” “But Yale. After they cure this thing, there won’t be any place left to go.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Sometimes she liked to treat this ghost like a son, talking to him at the tail end of night: Hello, pig-boy. I’m sorry your father wanted to eat you. She pictured a boy with hooves. She pictured a baby with ears on top of its head. Dayi wanted the pig-boy to stay. Whenever the neighbors retold the story of the murdered son, she always stopped them short of saying his name. As long as she never knew it, she could name him herself. She gave him her maiden name, a homonym for red. It was a relief to love something already dead. _ My mother said Dayi needed to get a job that would explain her gloves, so Dayi got a gig at the strip mall acupuncture parlor. She showed me her fake license, the laminated card printed with someone else’s name. When she took me to work, I sat at the reception counter with my legs crossed, my tongue greening on the guava candies I stole from the reception desk’s glass ashtray. Once, when a customer came in asking about hand jobs, she thought it meant any job you did with your hands. It’s called a strip mall for a reason, my mother said. Learn to take off everything but your gloves. _ In every version of the story, Mazu is the daughter of a fisherman. When she didn’t cry at birth, they named her Mo Niang: unmouthed maiden. Mazu taught herself to swim, held stones in her hands to practice winging through the water with carried weight. She could project herself in dreams, swimming out to save men from the mouths of storms. When she died saving her father and brother from a typhoon, she was rebuilt as a red statue. I asked Dayi if she really was the reincarnation of Mazu. She said no, we were descended from pigs: Oxen could plow and chickens could lay eggs, but hogs were born for slaughter, ferried from birth-hole to mouth-hole to shit-hole. I asked what happened to Mazu after she died, and Dayi said: America is a kind of afterlife. Looking at old photos of Dayi back on the island, I almost believed it: She stood on the beach, mouth full of light, braid heavy as an anchor. She was pregnant in almost all of them, her belly casting a shadow no body would fill. In the last photo we took of her, Dayi held a nail clipper in her mouth. She’d learned not to rely on her hands, to sew with a needle tucked between her two front teeth, tongue authoring the knot. I can do everything but wipe my own ass, she said, laughing. No one’s got a tongue long enough for that. _ Whenever Dayi fell asleep, my brother and I played our game: Whoever could fit the largest thing in her nostril without waking her was the winner. The first time, we shimmied a bobby pin into her nose before she snorted awake, oinking.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I was the woman choosing between sides, between side-wounds: Ama and my mother, related by blade. I filmed the back of my mother’s head jutting into the frame, her commentary when the love interest committed suicide ( I never liked that actress because she has my eyes ), the oil on her hands like sunlight. I wanted to set them on fire, to turn her hands into light-bouquets and capture the smoke onscreen. My mother said, You’ll never be able to sell any of that, and I said I didn’t want to sell her. There was a scene near the end where my mother turned her head to look back at the camera, her face outliving the screen behind her, brighter. She held herself still as if posing for a photo. Behind her, credits ribboning down the black like names of the dead, cueing us to continue. I rewatched the footage later and saw that all the actors were blurred or out of frame, no storyline salvageable. Everything off-focus except my mother’s face, the light speaking what I can’t subtitle, clarifying for the audience: She’s the only one I’ve been watching. _ After I fed Ama’s parable to the 口 , its mouth unbuttoned. The hole hummed, spitting pebbles like teeth, and when I pressed my ear to it, I could hear static like a radio, punctuated by the sound of Dayi’s voice. Bits of words, none born whole. I wondered if this was her mouth now, if I had tuned in to the frequency of ghost speech. Beneath us there was a pipeline of voices, intersecting where we stood. Calling down into the hole, I told Dayi that I missed her, that sometimes I felt her fingers pinning words to my tongue, her breath guitaring the strands of my hair. In the morning, I found two letters flapping loose around the yard, spat out by the 口 , and I chased them down, my tail perked for the hunt. Pinning them down with my feet, I took the letters home and soaked them in the bathroom sink. In the water, the words thrashed like fish, stilling only when I said them aloud. *1 Ok, what Ama really said here was foreigner, but I think we know she really means white person, white devil, gwailo, baigui, etc. Substitute your own culturally appropriate term here. *2 See the irony yet? *3 Ama really said once a month, but I thought moon would sound more old-timey. *4 Ama used a slur here—I prefer not to write it. *5 What is Ama trying to say about my father? *6 More on this soon! *7 I don’t know what an ordinary hog looks like, so please feel free to imagine this for me. *8 Is this a “that’s what he said” joke? Good one, Ama. *9 I wish I hadn’t just learned the Mandarin word for semen, but here we go. And yes, this story is being told in Mandarin.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  At night, I consulted the cookie tin in the closet, my ears magnetized to the toes rattling inside. The toes were butting over territory, acting like they belonged to enemy bodies. I knocked on the lid with my fist and they fired out, bulleting through the lid. One of them flew in and out of my mouth, threading my spit, teasing my teeth to bite it. Before my father came home, my mother spent her nights with me. We watched episodes of Desperate Housewives on the sofa that rose like a loaf of bread when it met our body heat. I dubbed the dialogue in Chinese and my mother spat five-spice peanuts at all the blondes onscreen. I asked her which of the wives she’d want to marry and she said Gaby: She wore cheetah-print, meaning she must be related to Hu Gu Po. A shared history of hunger. At night, my dreams collaged the plots of Desperate Housewives and Hu Gu Po: In this one, Gaby and her landscaper make love in the master bedroom while Gaby’s husband is away at work. But the landscaper’s penis grows a crown of canine teeth when he’s inside her, his palms serrating into paws. Gaby hemorrhages and dies. The landscaper tries to swallow his paws, but it’s too late. Her husband comes home and discovers a tiger pacing his master bedroom, trying to nudge the window open with its muzzle. On the floor is his wife, a lawn mower circling her body, scalping away the carpet. When I recounted this dream to my mother, she deleted every recorded episode. We’d liked Gaby because she was the only wife with our hair. She had the biggest closet, bigger than our bedroom. There was a crack in the TV screen letting the light out of every scene, striping the image onscreen, queering her face into mine. I wanted to surf Gaby’s skin with my tongue, stroke her sweat until it lifted from her skin, wings of crystallized salt. Instead, I licked the screen when her face came on, tasted my blood on her teeth. _ I knew a story: In some dynasty, when a father was sick, a daughter cut a piece of her own thigh to stir-fry and feed back to her father. Some daughters even donated their knees. Gegu: to cure what came before you. My father pinched the meat above my knee and said: If I was ever sick, would you give me this? He said he’d need that piece of me. It was the second day he was home and we were in the kitchen. My father spent hours filling the sink and then draining it, scribbling his name on the surface. I told him the water would never remember it. He stepped back, palming his rib cage, pretending to cough out his own fist.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Strangely, readers “believe” what’s rendered with physical clarity. I once had a reader say, “I knew when you put in that old can of Babbo cleanser you were telling the God’s honest truth.” A guy I played a kissing game with in junior high was stunned that thirty years later, I evoked his red shirt with a tiny sea horse embroidered on front. “You’re some kinda witch if you remember that,” he said. Again, in instants of hyperarousal, focus narrows; sense memories from these states may sometimes stay brighter in recollection than others. Anybody juiced on adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol—not unlike Angelou being scared in front of the church—registers sense impressions more intensely than in more typical time. Going back to the aforementioned kissing game, I can still distinctly feel myself inside the curved arms of the boy I’d so long had a crush on. Almost forty years later, I can still smell his Juicy Fruit gum. I put my hands up, almost to protect myself from standing too close, and my fingertips had the sea-horse outline imprinted on them. Of course, physical details, however convincing, actually prove zip in terms of truth. Surely I misremember all kinds of stuff. Maybe the boy I kissed was chewing Bazooka Joe or Dubble Bubble, say. But I think in this case the specific memory—even if wrong—is permissible, because readers understand the flaws of memory and allow for them. Noncarnal people may have to stretch to become memorable describers. We all start off sketching a character lightly—hair and eyes and weight like a driver’s license—and a less thoughtful writer may fail to sully the page with that person’s physical presence again, as if such a generic memory blurt makes an eternal impression. (As a kid, I was so revved up and anxious and hyper-vigilant that I studied people as if with a magnifying glass. Stimuli others barely register can still come across very loud to me.) A haunting sense of place should ripple off any good memoir once the cover’s closed, and you may reopen the front again as you would a gate to another land. Anybody with crisp recall can get half decent at describing stuff with practice. Hilary Mantel explains her own confidence in her memories as growing from their vivid

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  So, while the Women’s Cooperative Guild made it their cause to unionise the home-workers of East London, I made it mine to fatten up Florence, with breakfasts and lunches, with sandwich teas, with dinners and suppers and biscuits and milk. I had not much success with this, to start with - for, though I took to haunting the meat stalls of the Whitechapel Market, buying faggots and sausages, rabbits and tripe, and bagfuls of those scraps of flesh we had used to call, in Whitstable, ‘bits and ears’, I was really rather an indifferent cook, and was as liable to burn the meat, or leave it bloody, as make it savoury; Florence and Ralph did not notice, I think, because they were used to nothing better. But then, one day at the end of August, I saw that the oyster season had started up, and I bought a barrel of natives and an oyster knife; and as I put the blade to the hinge, it was as if I turned a key which unlocked all my mother’s oyster-parlour recipes, and sent them flooding to my finger-ends. I dished up an oyster-pie - and Florence put aside the paper she was writing on, to eat it, then picked at the crust that was left in the bowl, with her fork. The next night I served oyster-fritters, the next night oyster-soup. I made grilled oysters, and pickled oysters; and oysters rolled in flour and stewed in cream.When I passed a plate of this last dish to Florence, she smiled; and when she had tasted it, she sighed. She took a piece of bread-and-butter, and folded it to mop the sauce with; and the bread left cream upon her lips, that she licked at with her tongue, then wiped with her fingers. I remembered another time, in another parlour, when I had served another girl an oyster-supper, and accidentally wooed her; and as I was thinking of this, Florence lifted a spoonful of fish, and sighed again.‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I really think, that if there were one dish, and one dish only, that had to be served in paradise, that dish would be oysters - don’t you think so, Nance?’She had never called me ‘Nance’ before; and I had never, in all the months that I had lived with her then, known her say anything so fanciful.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In her house there was only her. When we’d pulled away, I’d looked through the back windshield, holding Agong’s head in my lap like a fruit I couldn’t figure out how to fit in my mouth. Ama watched me from the dark of her doorway, her knees blurring into each other. Her mouth was pitted from her face, a hole where she once had a name. She welded her left hand to the doorframe, held the dark open for us to exit through. The night was the same throat-dark as the inside of her house, and leaving felt like being swallowed, like symmetry: The farther we drove, the lower down we lived in her throat. We didn’t know if she was waiting for us to leave or to come back, only that she stood there longer than I looked, that the road startled like skin when we backed onto it. Even after we left, I found her face in a palm tree, a run-over dog, cows scabbing over a field, the dark bracketing our car, my mother in the rearview mirror, teething on her tongue to keep herself awake, one hand hooking out the window. Her fingers undoing the button of the moon. With my sleeve, I dabbed at the window like a wound, tried to wipe away Ama’s resemblance to the night. She let us go because years ago she’d tried to sever herself from her daughters, and not even the river could cut through them. She let us go, knowing she was with us in the car and in our yard, a fishline threaded through our spines. When I was home, I walked between my yard-holes, knowing Ama was on the other end of them. I fed my hands to the 口, imagined that Ama was doing the same on her end, our hands touching halfway between her city and mine, knotting at the wrist-root. This was the only way we could see each other, with our hands alone: without our full bodies to hurt each other, without words to want from each other. In the holes, a reforested dark. In a month, a tree would grow from the 口, a subterranean sapling just beginning to breach ground, touch night. The tree would have bark thick as buckles, a hollow trunk. It would grow to her height, dress in her shadow, a tree narrating her absence. In a month, when the tree braided out of the hole, born from no seed but my hands, I would water it. * Fact: The Nationalists confiscated my grandmother’s land a second time. Watakushi, she said again and again. It is mine. It is mine. She claims her land in a language that’s not hers. She lines up her Is like a fence: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The I doesn’t indicate a presence but an absence, the place where a body has been redacted from the sentence.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  At the end of the meal, Duck Uncle said he’d been waiting to surprise us. I made an investment, he said. He signaled for the waiter, who nodded and walked back into the kitchen. Four waiters wheeled out a fish tank. The tank was at least as tall as me, the water a dyed-blue that was almost opaque. There was nothing inside the tank except for a floating red ribbon, flickering. A dragonfish, my mother said, and when I leaned closer to the glass I saw that it was a fish, that the ribbon spooled and unspooled on its own, an eye sewn on like a bead. It costs 10,000 dollars, Duck Uncle said, but I got it for half that. I’d heard of dragonfish in big hotels on the mainland, where my father had gone. They were smuggled out of rivers. The shinier their scales, the more luck it would deliver its owner. The dragonfish was the length of my arm, whipping from one end of the tank to the other. After Duck Uncle went bankrupt in the recession, he returned the fish tank. He bagged the dragonfish and took it home, releasing it into his toilet. Said he’d flush it back out to the sea, but we knew the salt would kill it. My brother and I scooped it out of his toilet with a bucket and slid it into our filled kitchen sink, watching it try to lasso itself. Let’s sell it for 10,000 dollars, my brother said. My mother said the fish was a fake. She’d known it wasn’t real the moment the light hit it: The scales were painted on, probably with nail polish. She butchered it the night he left, scraping the shell of pigment from its skin, and then we could see its real scales underneath, a color like smog. The night before Duck Uncle left, we saw my mother straddling the stump of the eucalyptus tree she’d felled in his yard. She said the stars were fish. But they’re not moving, we said. Because they want to be caught, my mother said. She raised her hook-finger to the sky and we waited all night for it to lure something. Near morning, a plane came to unzip the dark. It flew low, tailing light. It’s on fire, I said, and thought of Duck Uncle inside it. If we slit open the plane’s belly like a fish, he would spill out all shiny and scarfed in guts. I thought it was unfair that she was the only one being the bait, so I stuck my tongue out at the sky and wriggled it like a worm, luring all the lost.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Work that wrung all the water from his body. I came second, a daughter shaped like floodwater, and by then he was coming home late every day, shimmying off his sweat, watering the carpet until it grew past my ankles. I ducked under the kitchen table, fleeing the radius of his rain, trimming the carpet down with a pair of eyebrow scissors. When he left the room to shower for hours, spending so long in the bathroom I wondered if he’d become water and gone down the drain too, I crawled where he’d rained all over the floor, touching my tongue to his sweat, divining where his body had been based on taste. He’d been at the beach, I told my brother, and he’d kidnapped all the salt from the sea, holding it hostage here. After work, my father irrigated our apartment building’s shared courtyard, scooping trenches too straight to be veins. When it rains, he said, the water won’t flood. It’ll be outsourced. I asked him how he knew where the water had to go, and he pointed at a pack of bushes with finger-shaped flowers. Water follows want, he said. If the body is really mostly water, I asked, then how come it can burn? My father said something about parts and sums: how water is a part and the body is the sum, but I didn’t want to do the math and ran back inside. The first time I saw him install a water hose, I asked him what he was holding and he said a snake just to scare me. At school, when the teacher told us the snake was temptation and Eve was evil, I thought of my father cradling that green hose, feeding bushes that weren’t his, shucking petals off a flower and licking them like stamps to press onto my cheeks. When he turned the hose on, water sprang from its mouth and that was a miracle. I remember him whipping my brother with that hose, its metal mouth striking between my brother’s rolled- back eyes. I remember him saying, I’m sorry, but this is the only way you’ll grow. _ My mother got a job at a company that manufactured photocopiers. In the mornings, she drove west to a building so tall it sanded the sky smooth. All day, she sat at a desk and answered customer calls with an accent. The only reason you haven’t been fired is because you’re a minority, said the woman from marketing. When they promoted her to receptionist, my mother had official access to the black-and-white photocopier, where she made copies of handwritten notices to be circulated around the office: Please refrain from using air fresheners. Please refrain from bringing food with nuts or shellfish into the communal kitchen. Please do not flush menstrual products down the toilet. Menstrual, which she spelled minstrel.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Your father half of a foot gone missing in a war when he was a child on the mainland he stepped on a Japanese landmine his shin shot up speared the sky flesh fountain it made him laugh the pain the doctor puzzled his foot back together. He snuck out every day of bedrest lugged his dead foot he found a cave on the fourth day the clouds shaped like colons inside the dark a girl & her shadow eight-limbed . He assumed she came to meet a man or a moon she taught him how to make shadow puppets on the wall of the cave filtering light through fingers pasting the dark over the night in the morning he crawled home spent days practicing silhouettes nightly he climbed to the cave his shadow-tutor casting stories onto stone. Most about revenge: stories the boy who grows his foot back twice as large & clawed & your father never made love to the shadow-girl tried once but the girl was cave rock it hurt to enter her one week a rockslide down the mountain he crawled toward the cave saw its mouth gated by boulders he tackled each stone by the time light broke in morning & no one inside when he spoke her name what he thought was her name: his echo never noticed that before. He danced his shadows along the walls she never answered his hands with her own: When your father told me this story I revised the ending one day the shadow-girl waiting with an oil lamp. She threw it at the entrance to enter the cave he must walk through burn the body that brought him to me when your father met me he shadowed me for days heeled like a bitch broke an umbrella in my fist I said make me a new one he folded it from newspaper oiled so the water leapt off it handle carved from the body of his warpistol he kissed me beneath my skin wasn’t even raining the sun a bullet through us both * WHAT IF YOUR TAIL IS SOME KIND OF REGROWN UMBILICAL CORD? WHAT IF YOU’RE BEING FED THROUGH IT? I KNOW CORDS DON’T USUALLY GROW OUT OF THE ASS, BUT IF I WERE AN UMBILICAL CORD, I’D WANT TO COME BACK AND AVENGE BEING CUT. WHAT ARE UMBILICAL CORDS FOR, ANYWAY? THEY HYPHENATE TWO BODIES. DO YOU SPEAK THROUGH IT LIKE A TELEPHONE CORD? DOES IT CARRY MEMORY FROM THE MOTHER TO THE BABY? —BENGRANDMOTHERLetter [ ]: In which I am the driver [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] Dear [ ] daughter, Jiejie, girl I gave to this country,

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben told me about the weather in which she was fermented: I was conceived during a sandstorm, she said. In Ningxia where she was born, sand formed a pelt over the sky and no one could see for months. They wore wet scarves around their mouths and the sand flayed away their front teeth, their eyelashes. I asked her how she’d known who was who, and Ben answered by closing her eyes and reaching out both arms. We walk like this. She kneaded my cheek, inventing dimples. Her touch could name me better than language. I wanted to say I understood about the sand in her belly: There was also a hunger in me that was more than a body’s. Do you think we’ll get sick, I said, from touching those feathers? In the beginning of the year, when the TV repeated warnings of the Asian bird flu, the teachers had shown up to school wearing face masks with whirring fans. There are so many of you here, we don’t want to get sick. Species could share diseases, they told us, and SARS came from bats and other winged things. When birds and people get too close, they said, one of them gets sick. Ben said she was immune to the bird flu. Her grandmother had died from it and she had been exposed, which meant I was exposed now too. She said I could run away if I wanted to, but instead I stayed and asked her what the symptoms were. It began slow, she told me: First you grew feathers out of your armpits. It would be itchy. Then your lips protruded into a beak and you would only be able to eat sand, seeds, and fingernails. The last symptom was flight. It was safer for your close family members to release you where there was only sky, no telephone wires to get electrocuted on, no windows to mistake for mothers. At a crosswalk, I looked at her before the lights changed. Ben wore her FOB dot on the upper right arm, a vaccine scar the size and shape of my thumbprint. The scar opaled her skin, changing shades depending on the time of day, the season, and where she stood in relation to light. My mother had one too, on her left arm, and I liked the way it puckered like a nipple when it was cold. My mother’s FOB dot was lake-shaped, waiting to be entered. I wanted one too, wanted to dig the scar out of Ben’s arm and swallow its pearl.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  It would be this way through the rest of college, and then when Claire moved to another city—Fiona always knew she would—and visited twice a year. But at Christmastime she announced she’d be spending the summer in Colorado. She came home for a week in June and then Fiona drove her to O’Hare, and when Fiona started getting out of the car to circle around and hug her, Claire said, “They’ll start honking.” And she quickly kissed her mother’s cheek. And that was it. That was all. The girl shook her head. “I mean, she looks a little like Valeria.” The guy said, “Is she Czech?” Fiona said no, told them she had a little girl. The guy said, “Let me get Kate. She knows all the kids that come in.” And then this Kate was standing there, tall and British, peering at the photograph. Kate said, “I couldn’t say for sure.” “She’s older now,” Fiona said. “She looks like that actress from American Hustle.” There was a man waiting behind them to buy a stack of paperbacks, and so they stepped away, further into the store. Serge took the photo, held it by the edges. “She must miss you.” Fiona didn’t know how to answer that. Serge said, “You’ll stay for Richard’s show, okay? His friends mean so much to him.” “I’ll try.” “No, no, promise!” Serge smiled, a smile so suddenly dazzling that it must have let him waltz through his entire life making demands like that. “I think I’ll have overstayed my welcome by that point.” “So we kick you out and get you a hotel! Promise.” “Okay,” Fiona said, “I promise.” She wasn’t sure she meant it, but it didn’t hurt to say. Another nine days away from the resale shop was too long, but in nine days she’d either have found Claire or would still be looking—and could she go home in either case? Before they left, Fiona grabbed an English book of Paris history just so she wouldn’t walk out empty-handed, the staff feeling sad for her. The mustachioed bookseller was ranting to a customer about American DVD players. Something about the frames per second. “Americans don’t even care!” he said. “That’s why I moved to Paris.” He threw his hands in the air. Fiona stopped herself from laughing. It couldn’t be true, could it? That someone would uproot as easily as that? Everyone she’d ever known to leave America had done it for solid reasons: job, romance, politics. To study, like Nora. Claire and Kurt had fled the reach of the Hosanna Collective—although she’d considered the possibility that Claire was running from her, from some perceived childhood trauma. But what if it was nothing more than a lark? First the commune, then Paris, next a sheep farm in Bulgaria? What if Fiona had simply failed, as distracted as she was in those early years of Claire’s life, to tether her daughter tightly enough to the world? The guy looked at the price.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see. _ Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When we drove him to the airport, I counted the hours his flight would take, calculated that he would land the hour I woke. I didn’t sleep that night, telling myself that as long as I never woke, he would never land: our father forever midflight. That night, flying my kite in the rain, I saw the paper shrivel into a fist before falling. From the sky, my father said we’d make a new one, a kite so large we could strap it to our backs and leave the country. I lost the kite that night, stayed out till morning to watch it reappear, as if light could undo any loss. It was years before I realized that kites were only puppetry and could only fake their flight. Real flight involved no leashes or strings. Birds did not come with girls tied to them, girls reeling them down, girls the opposite of the sky. My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see. _ Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body. In Jiangsu, my mother said, where my ba was born, there were daughtertrees.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was clapping; Tricky rose to say - what he said every night, so that half the audience smiled and said it with him - that You couldn’t get many of those to the pound! Then - as if it were part of the overture to her routine and she could not work without it - I gripped my seat and held my breath, while he raised his gavel to beat out Kitty Butler’s name. She sang that night like - I cannot say like an angel, for her songs were all of champagne suppers and strolling in the Burlington Arcade; perhaps, then, like a fallen angel - or yet again like a falling one: she sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed. And as she did so, I sang with her - not loudly and carelessly like the rest of the crowd, but softly, almost secretly, as if she might hear me the better if I whispered rather than bawled. And perhaps, after all, she did. I had thought that, when she walked on to the stage, she had glanced my way - as much as to say, the box is filled again. Now, as she wheeled before the footlights, I thought I saw her look at me again. The idea was a fantastic one - and yet every time her gaze swept the crowded hall it seemed to brush my own, and dally with it a little longer than it should. I ceased my whispered singing and merely stared, and swallowed. I saw her leave the stage - again, her gaze met mine - and then return for her encore. She sang her ballad and plucked the flower from her lapel, and held it to her cheek, as we all expected. But when her song was finished she did not peer into the stalls for the handsomest girl, as she usually did. Instead, she took a step to her left, towards the box in which I sat. And then she took another. In a moment she had reached the corner of the stage, and stood facing me; she was so close I could see the glint of her collar-stud, the beat of the pulse in her throat, the pink at the corner of her eye. She stood there for what seemed to be a small eternity ; then her arm came up, the flower flashed for a second in the beam of the lime - and my own hand, trembling, rose to catch it. The crowd gave a broad, indulgent cheer of pleasure, and a laugh. She held my flustered gaze with her own more certain one, and made me a little bow. Then she stepped backwards suddenly, waved to the hall, and left us. I sat for a moment as if stunned, my eyes upon the flower in my hand, which had been so near, so recently, to Kitty Butler’s cheek.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And can I let people into where my visioning happens? Can we be intimate at the level of our longings? What as a society can we truly long for? Can I truly say out loud? So yes, all of that. Cara. And before we close, I do want to say that my work with Southerners on New Ground really was transformative in how we moved work.44 I’m talking like ten years ago or eight years ago. I was living in the South for seventeen years. Our organizing was moved by the questions: How do we move toward liberation with our longing and desire? And what do we long for? And these questions were a beautiful realization that “what do we long for?” to me holds “what do we remember? What can we imagine? What do we desire?” And that’s a very different language from “protect and defend,” which is critical too, but we’re on a spectrum of understanding, our heart must be in this. Our spirit must be in this. Our memory is in this. Our collective bodies and desires must be in this. And all of that is integral to our transformation. amb. Fuck yes. Thank you for taking this time. Cara. Thank you so much. Keep doing what you do. Peace. 31 This conversation took place on April 13, 2017, transcription by ill Weaver.32 Cara was the executive director of the Audre Lorde Project for five years.33 There will be an audiobook! I hope it will include Cara’s voice.34 See Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this volume, p. 27.35 Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York: Penguin Random House, 1980); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984).36 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.37 Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (New York: Scribner Poetry, 1997).38 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.39 amb note to self: Make sure you hound Cara until you actually get to see this cool young ripe performance!40 James Baldwin, The Amen Corner: A Drama in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1961).41 Here, Cara is referencing my work as a healer, somatic teacher, and bodyworker.42 Adaku Utah is the founder and a collective member of Harriet’s Apothecary.43 When Cara said this, I snapped and heard the snaps of a million ancestors, who also at that moment said, “Oh, snap!”44 Southerners on New Ground (SONG) is a regional queer liberation organization made up of people of color, immigrants, undocumented people, people with disabilities, working-class and rural and small town LGBTQ people in the South.A Spoilerific Gush on How Octavia Butler Turns Me OnI once sat on Octavia Butler’s face. It was stitched onto a pillow in a tent in Dubai, and we were in public, but I still flush at the sheer longing I felt in that moment.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If you find yourself naked with someone who doesn’t look at you with the love, care, and worship with which you see yourself, reclaim your skin—there are always more lovers in the sea or the app. Someone wants your body whole. Wait for that. Get Consent While it’s amazing that this needs to be said, don’t get naked in front of others without consent. Don’t show up and just whip off your raincoat or expose yourself on someone’s lawn as a romantic gesture. You don’t know how your nakedness will impact another. Permission and boundaries—those powerful acts of saying maybe or no—allow for real freedom within a connection. Get Naked Your miraculous body is a gift to you and a gift to those who get to see it and be with it. Undress in that manner, as if you are untying a bow around a precious and well thought-out gift. Make eye contact and see your power and desirability in your lover’s eyes. This is your living body; this is what aliveness feels like. Hot and Heavy Homework Assess your comfort in your nakedness: If you don’t feel fully comfortable dancing (it can just be a head bop) naked in your bathroom mirror, begin a practice of looking and finding your sexy, whole, and sacred self. One of my practices this past year has been to take pictures of my whole body and post them with the hashtag #sexyfat—to will myself and others to understand that the thickness truly is a delight. I feel like it has been a reprogramming that has made my nakedness, my movement, my sex, and my life feel much more powerful. It’s also been helpful to engage others. At first people would say “that’s sexy, not fat,” like they thought I didn’t know how to choose words to describe myself. Slowly, though, I think folks have caught on to the intention. Perhaps even been a bit reprogrammed themselves. 55 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “It’s Time to Reclaim Our Skin: How Getting Naked Restores Our Dignity,” January 10, 2018, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/its-time-reclaim-our-skin/how-getting-naked-restores-our-dignity.I Want You, but I’m TriggeredWe don’t see it coming.56 We are having a moment of intimacy: a moment we’ve been desiring and have been moving toward. And here it is, clothing is coming off, and the connection is good and new and hot, and then boom—a flashback comes at the tip of a lover’s fingers, the thrust of a tongue, a hand at the throat—suddenly we are pulled back to a moment of terror, violation, or confusion. Our bodies feel caught up in that memory state and cannot register the present moment, can’t tell if we are, in fact, safe here. Our hearts pound, sweat comes to the palms and upper lip, and perhaps we gasp for air, pull into balls of ourselves, lose our ability to explain coherently what is happening. We break the connection with our lover.