An Invitation to Engagement During aYear Like None Other

presents

Collection 4

In My Time: A Narrative Space

Misha Rai Introduction 1

Tiana Clark The First Black Bachelorette 4 Kenyon Review Nov/Dec 2018

Carla Diaz An Effort Toward Wholeness 12

Kenyon Review Online Sept/Oct 2019

Nate Marshall telling stories; the best story is about home

because that’s the story part; slave grammar 20

Kenyon Review Online July/Aug 2020

Susan Stinson Slow 24

Kenyon Review Online Mar/Apr 2018

Collection 4

1 Introduction

Misha RaiKenyon Review Fellow

IntroductionNate Marshall’s sharp poem “telling stories” is a rumination on truth and, as the title of the poem suggests, telling stories. He writes,

my grandma, like all Black grandmothers

perhaps, told me do not tell stories,by which she meant do not lie except we couldn’t say “lie,”

which was a curse word in her house.

This fact of how a lie is a curse has never been more apparent than the times we are living in now. As we progress through the second year of the pandemic, hungover from its assault and taken aback by its longevity, none of us can ignore how badly people in charge of our systems of care have failed us. One bruised fallout from this has meant a time of deep introspection, whether we like it or not. And perhaps a realization about the many new ways of surviving we have internalized. In this fourth installment of the Kenyon Review’s “In My Time: A Narrative Space” series, we bring to you a selection of pieces from our pages that previously explored all the ways in which this internalization has bludgeoned through our consciousness. This can mean us processing our lives through the screens in front of us. Or through the memories of our grandmothers. Or how we inhabit the static of our body parts. How our minds narrow and expand all at once, a confusing array, like going to sleep hoping tomorrow will be something different, but it is the same as it was last night. Except when it isn’t. The pandemic claims another casualty and it may not be a life it takes. Still through this — big and small losses — we survive in the stories we tell ourselves.

Tiana Clark’s incisive poem “The First Black Bachelorette” cracks open the ways in which violence is done to Black women’s bodies in the name of pleasure. That violence can be self-inflicted, learned, groomed, forced upon, and witnessed, as the speaker does, watching multiple

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television shows. It is definitely internalized, embodied, and repudi-ated. Clark writes, “I require something fake,” and in the same stanza,

There was an episode once

on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Airwith the actress Tisha Campbell.

The premise: they were on a date

and stuck in a basement for hours.

She stripped off her weave, fake nails,

contacts, and eyelashes. She molted.

Will then asks, Now, what elseon your body can I get at the mall?

Those lines alone could haunt a reader, but what makes this poem uncomfortably exceptional is the speaker’s desire to lay bare the compli-cations of the body she inhabits and how there is no escaping the hunger with which we are depicted and how we inevitably depict ourselves.

In Carla Diaz’s essay “An Effort Toward Wholeness” the reader is treated to the dizzying effect of remembering in the pursuit of being complete. Through the lens of literature, language, and memory we are introduced to a host of characters that inhabit her past and present, friends and strangers alike. Structured in the form of a lyrical inves-tigation are statements and questions that lead to answers that even the writer may not be wholly satisfied with. But there is something poignant about the act of recollecting, coming to terms with what may never be codified like the email in Diaz’s inbox that starts and ends the inquiry in this essay.

“Slow,” by Susan Stinson begins with her trying to decide if she should get up from where she has seated herself to join a conversation. She writes — “I am a fat woman in my fifties with arthritis. Getting up from the low step would take time.” From there the narrative unfurls upwards and extends out in a long exhale as she examines what it has meant to live in her body “within the limitations of an explicitly vindictive culture.” Where her body was once an awareness of shame in the inhale, in the exhale it is the awareness of what that slowness can embody. As profoundly terrifying as it is for her to be “Fat. Halt. Slow,” it is also where she finds the fuel that powers her storytelling and provides representation for people “who can’t live within the stories the dominant culture tells on us.”

Of the packet of three poems by Nate Marshall included in this series, the first poem “telling stories” distills the essence of the others. There is a clarion call sounded for all of us to examine where we come from, who tells our stories, what language Marshall uses to talk about

3 Introduction

Black stories, constantly reinventing itself, abolishing by changing, by refusing the standards that come with the stillness of the written word. At its core, “telling stories” is a rumination about love and loss. He writes,

does that mean i love youis always bound to end up

a story? if so what kind?

The kind that gives us hope and the kind that we need to tell as many times as it takes for us to survive.

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Tiana Clark

The First Black BacheloretteWhen Bryan was kissing Racheland slid his hand inside her hair, her long,long hair, I wondered if he felt threadedtracks of weave and what he thoughtwhen he felt her weave. Was he startledor did he know? But. When he reachedfor her, I felt his fingers on my scalp, too,I did, through the TV, I swear, I was wincing.My white guy doesn’t like fake things, but Ilike my fake hair long and my real hair protected,my glory tucked and hidden. Something easyand fast. I’m hoping it will grow, too. I wonderwho does Rachel’s hair on the show, blendingher “leave out” with her natural hair. Who slicksher edges down with good grease and a boar brushwhen the wind blows back her baby hairs?

• •

There was an episode onceon the Fresh Prince of Bel-Airwith the actress Tisha Campbell.The premise: they were on a dateand stuck in a basement for hours.She stripped off her weave, fake nails,contacts, and eyelashes. She molted.Will then asks, Now, what elseon your body can I get at the mall?RuPaul says, We’re all born nakedand the rest is drag. Derrick has a list

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of funny drag names and I want one.I want to be called what I really amor what I pretend to be, which, I guessin a way, is me? Or someone who I thinkmight be beautiful enough to be approached,discovered. Someone who doesn’t haveto pay for movers. Someone who walksinto a party and doesn’t have to be anxiousbecause the privilege of their beautymakes them at rest and people find vacationsin their faces. I require something fake.Woven and glued, stuck to my bodybut not of my body. How does a bodyeven start?

• •

Sometimes my eyes feel thickand weird from fresh eyelash extensions.In the beginning, my head hurtfrom the braided ropes of hairencircling my scalp, tight.But you want it tight, she says.You want the cornrowsso small that your fakehair looks passable, believableas a bullet. In hope, you takethe pain. It takes so damn longto be almost beautiful. I’ve satin salon chairs all day with black womenbehind me, laboring and taming my mane.I like the patterned crop circles carvedinto my scalp right before the weftsof somebody else’s Brazilian hair are sewnlike human icing into mine, delicious.I want the fire to smell a type of threatin me and back away. I want the fireto know I was already consumed, burnedinside my belonging.

• •

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There is a hankering.A hungry choir that cravesmoney and porn, meaningmy thoughts are well lit,staged, and faking it, too.Even my soul is preoiled,fluffed, bleached, waxed,nubile, licking, and staring downthe camera to ash. The trickis looking like you like it,like you enjoy getting slammed,which is why I like being groomed:getting yanked, painted, cut,and plucked. I’ve been on all foursas a woman ripped mefrom my center, where I splitin jeweled halves. I did not yellas I bit my lip, grabbed the corners.I enjoy how people look at mewhen they think I might be beautiful.I enjoy porn best when I thinkthey might be enjoying themselves, too.When there might be real pleasureat stake, but who can say really?Not showing pain gets you paid.

• •

It takes a lot of money to look this trashy,Dolly Parton says. And yet, Rachel.Rachel, who scratches your dandrufflike Tea Cake in chapter elevenin Their Eyes Were Watching God?Who detangles and combs your hairwith deep conditioner? Who wrapsyour hair at night? Has Bryan seen youin your silk bonnet yet? You knowit’s real when your riding on topwith your hair wrapped. LaLa saysshe was never ugly, just poor.I want my teeth fixed and chiseled

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but veneers are so expensive. I hidemy coffee-stained crooked things.Cardi B raps, Got a bag and fixedmy teeth. Hope you hoes knowit ain’t cheap. So I try to hidethe unevenness in my teethwhen I talk, which means,sometimes, I don’t talkwhen I can see myself. I tryto hide the gaps and how sharpmy teeth really are. How animal.How lower class. How cash poormy mouth really is. I don’t look prettywhen I cum. My mouth, open. My jaw,slack and sideways, pooling spit.My deadened eyes fixed on oneobject in the room. This time, a chair.This time, a corner, half in shadow.This time, I just wanted to watcha black woman on TV fall in lovefor entertainment. For escape.The best cure for microagressionsis shitty TV, and again, Cardi B.

• •

Amaud says, for us, American blacks,we are postapocalyptic. The endis not near but behind us. We arewhat remains of our six million dead.We are what was not hung, dumped,or flung from the Zong, splashingand graveless, lest you think the oceana tombstone. The ocean is not scaredor scared enough. But. We out here.Anyway. Trying to save ourselves, still.Still sprinkling black pepper behindour feet as we run away. But. There isno north now. We find the drinking gourdwithin our cells. Guiding stars withinour own black-lit blood. We glow.

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Maybe it is true then . . . that beautyis a type of survivors’ guilt, a sackclothI suffer and itch and injure from and for.Or, rather, that I am seen through sin?Dirty Hottentot zoois my body.

• •

I was such a terrible Lady Macbethin high school. Her maniadidn’t make sense to meuntil it was activated in mewhen a man left me in my bloodand twenties. There is a typeof grief I carry in my hands,some dark unwipeablethought. Some liquid other.Like my daddy’s DNA. His spots.I’m trying to cover themwith this talk of beauty.I’m repenting for something — I don’t know what.I wasn’t meant to be born,but ain’t I a beautiful bastard?And doesn’t everybodywant to be cleanedby slices of jailed light?Yes, it’s true,I want my eyebrowsmicrobladed for $700.There are specific timeswhen I don’t want to be wanted:1) At night. 2) When I’m alone.3) At night, when I’m walking aloneto my car. 4) An empty parking lot.5) A man approaches. 6) He sniffs me,knowing that familiar scentof pressure and pissfrom other menthat have marked

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me, too. 7) Didn’t they touch mebecause I was beautiful?Or did they sensewhat was easy to poke?

• •

I’ve always wonderedwhat made a slave beautifulenough to be raped.What about the bodymade it worth itto commit a sinon what they deemeda damned body.Maybe beauty had nothingto do with it. Of course, it’salways about power, but maybethere was a type of sheen?Lacquer on black bodiesbaking under sun?Or funk from the field?Or the house slavedilating from roomto room, a physiologicalscent that niggles, perhaps?How close desire isto a type of terror,owned and familiar.When I get readywith golden highlighteris this what I am . . . what I accentuate?For my cheekboneto sparkle in the spectrallight of my deadbelling inside me?The sparkle of deadslaves is forever in me,still, so iridescent.

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• •

Keats wrote,Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all. . . .I don’t know what that means.I’ve had some dark inklingabout it’s succinct finality;even in class I pretendedto know what the poem was aboutwhen I would discuss ekphrasisand the Grecian urn to my students,telling them about art responding to artand how to make a static image sing,but even then, I was pretending.I don’t want to be dumb — my worst fear: a bunch of studentswould all point and call me a fraud.I once asked Mark, my professorin grad school, when I would stopfeeling like an imposter.He said I would feel this wayfor the rest of my life,which I think is closer to sometype of truth, which is attractive,because it provides reliefto know everyone might bejust as insecure and afraid of othersas me, and, possibly, watchingThe Bachelorette on Monday nights,like when I found outon the podcast Commonplace,Sharon Olds loves the show, too,I squealed, because I wasn’t aloneanymore.

• •

I’m not writingfor mastery or legacy.I could care less.In fact, I might be

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writing against it,a way of talking backto beauty, backto the spoiled fruiton the altar of my body,to the pressurized gazeon my skin Every. Damn.Day. I’m hyperawarethat I am hypervisible,says Hope Oloye, 20,from Newham, east London,the only black biomedical studentin her year at Oxford.Who hasn’t been brokenby a touch? Who hasn’t been barbedby a glare? You can’t write poemsabout beauty when the streets are fullof racists and rapists and the presidentis a pussy grabber. I want to pegthe canon. So I am running backand forth between the house of silenceand the house of shame shouting overand over with ink-stained fingers:on days when I write with duende,no one can touch me!

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Carla Diaz

An Effort Toward WholenessRe: Greetings

A family friend — my surrogate Grandfather — sends me an e-mail. Inbox (1). Who am I kidding? Inbox (48). The Gap is always having a sale; Ancestry.com is making new discoveries about my DNA; Password Assistance Required for Amazon, for eBay, for PayPal — how have I reached my late twenties and not devised a system? In this pile of SPAM and advertisements is one e-mail from a human being who calls me by the wrong name. I do not correct him. Carla Imelda Díaz, he writes. If you think that I forgot you, Carla Imelda, you are wrong. He is not, first and foremost, English-speaking, which explains why his diction is bard-like and unequivocal. An option to reply with, So good to hear from you — my chosen family — I’m doing well, also that is not my name, how are you? But he loves to call me by this new name, which is not mine, which is Imelda. There are worse names. The word itself is gilded — bestowed upon me like some kind of diadem. Inbox as coronation ceremony, as throne of velvet and unalloyed metal. She is me, but ancient and with a finer palette, sipping dessert wines and spooning into her mouth mariscos off the coast of Andalucía. After some Internet research, I learn that Imelda is the Spanish derivation of Irmhild, whose Germanic elements translate to “whole.”

A word that means “in an unbroken or undamaged state”

is a high bar for anything. Especially for persons and for essays. A lesson from Charles D’Ambosio picks me up off the floor, tucks my hair behind my ears, brings me into a room with a fireplace and tea: the problem with an essay can eventually become its subject.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort toward wholeness,

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writes Madeleine L’Engle in her book Walking on Water. I agree, except, maybe, for the times when creation is an effort toward disappearance. Taking a moment to step outside the conference room of your life. Representation as new life; we distort pleasingly.

There is a bird outside my window that unfolds and folds its wings. It is nine o’clock in the morning. OK — it is eleven o’clock in the morning. My roommate is in the kitchen sauteing garlic and onions. A child shrieks on Bedford Avenue. We make a choice; we leave an impression; the impression is who we are. The page is both a window and scrim, and when I look outside the bird is gone.

True or false: the writer creates in order to forget the truth that noth-ing happens for a reason. A theory for testing, which I will turn over in my hand like a pebble until it no longer resembles or feels like a pebble. In creating something outside of herself, the artist disappears through it, within it. A second body, chosen body, one that holds her better than the one she was born into. Not the body that betrays her in new ways every day: a pool of blood gathering in her underwear the week she’s been dumped; a perennial, inexplicable exhaustion tearing throughout her bones like a rumor in the body; early-years joint aches in wintertime — an overture to someday arthritis. Not the bodies that betray her by disappearing, never to return. There is a voice that I am standing on the edge of. ¿Para quien son las flores, si no son para mi? The tune, I remember. I fall asleep without conviction. As a child, I learned that this, too, is a way to disappear.

When someone you haven’t seen in ten years / appears at the door / don’t start singing him all your new songs. / You will never catch up.

Four lines in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “The Art of Disappearing.” Never mind the disappeared. The departed chose to depart. The aban-doned are resentful. The burden falls on them to sing.

In attempting to comfort me after my father’s death, my babysitter told me that before people are born, they plan out their whole lives ahead of time: where on the stairs they will spill their laundry coins, when in their thirties they will change their mind about capers, what type of pain they’ll be most acquainted with: shooting or aching, how hard they will fall (inevitably, inconveniently, despite all plans) in love. This includes the date and time that they will open their mouths to take in their very last breath, how they will pinch the cool, thick quilt between their fingers, gaze out the window at a world that — despite

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the slowing and cooling of their own body — undergoes construction. Cranes everywhere. Giant seesaws that make the skyline an industrial playground. At the age of six, I balked at this idea — that he could have, in some existential way, planned his own death. For him to know he was leaving and not tell us didn’t sound like him. My father told my mother when he was going to the refrigerator. During these early years, family functioned, in my mind, like a neverending playdate. All welcome in the king-sized bed. The four of us staying inside for an entire weekend, erecting forts on the carpet with kitchen chairs for scaffolding and pillows for doors. My parents’ marriage, devoted and sure-footed. When nothing happens for a reason, we make meaning in the aftermath.

I see the appeal of my babysitter’s worldview. It debunks the random-ness of disappearance. Turns something we are all so afraid of, that extends beyond the pale of our imaginations, into an orderly and sur-mountable To-Do.

It doesn’t matter who my father was, it matters who I remember he was,

Anne Sexton wrote in a journal entry. I study a photo of her taken in 1961. Her foot perches on a shelf just outside of the frame, her sleepy head leans against the palm of her smoking hand, a smile — not shy, but understated, like she is keeping a secret of yours. I study her eyes. Do you really believe that?

Things I remember: Cafe Bustelo. A faded green sweatshirt cov-ered in bleach spots. Two leather fanny packs. Running water — a bath? — scalding. Tall, holey socks. The sap of a Christmas tree between my thumb and index. A Looney Tunes T, once whole, later rags, now gone. Hand-holding? Walking on his back. Wide-necked classical guitars. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Velazquez. The Yankees. Chess. . . .

Growing up, my brother, Matt, played chess competitively. Our father taught him how the pieces travel across the board — jumping, sliding, inching forward one square at a time. After joining his school’s chess club and putting in months of practice, Matt began to beat our father at his own game. They sat quietly at the kitchen table on either side of a cluttered kingdom, Matt keeping track of all their moves with a steno pad and a ballpoint pen, our father happy and losing.

. . . The wooden smell of castanets. The soothing, dampened flap of a book shutting. Bikes dangling from ceiling hooks, hovering over the

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kitchen table. Unsmudged summer windows. Peeling yellow brick. Chalky, wrought iron fire escapes. Ballet feet. Hot tears on the play-ground. One chipped, fuchsia helmet. Falling asleep to the radio. Lofted beds and wooden ladders. Finished cabinets. New Balance. The Jets’ oh-so-plain green jerseys. The whoosh of a window AC unit. Blood rushing to my head as I hung upside down by the ankles. Cold tiles under two feet. Is this even memory anymore? Perhaps I am reaching now for this story I write for you.

It matters who I remember he was. I’d like to add that it also matters who my abuela remembers he was. She is old now — older than most people will ever be — and she is forgetting things. This includes English and, occasionally, when light lances through the lace curtains at a cer-tain angle, us. Despite not having seen my father in twenty years, she expects he is running late. Don’t start singing him all your new songs. Once, when my brother and I went to visit, she greeted us at the door and believed him to be Miguel. That was a risk we took. They look so similar, my aunts and I parroted in a hushed frenzy. Matthew, we said, se llama Matthew.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort toward wholeness.

Literature tells a joke but no one is laughing. Its macabre truth: lan-guage, no matter how skilled the speaker, is perennially inaccurate. Like wholeness, we stretch forward as it endlessly recedes. Is the exercise itself the chosen body? Straining, we learn languages, trace our family names. We spit in plastic tubes the size and shape of tampons and send them to specialists who will recount our ancestries. We make travel plans to places we hope will aid us in our efforts to achieve self-un-derstanding. We leap without looking:

One Spring, I flew to Puerto Rico this way. While I was there, I

resolved to speak only in Spanish, but when people heard my incom-

plete sentences they responded in English. El baño, por favor. When

no one heard me, I decided to hold it.

Have you ever flailed, splashed inside your biggest question? Waved to your brother — He came! He came! — only to realize a moment later that is just a tall, dark-haired man. Have you caught yourself in the reflection of a shop window and flinched? Experimented with prayer and been met with the stunningly flat ahhh of the dishwasher? I passed people on the sidewalk, stared into their faces. I examined eyes, mouths, noses. I looked for my father and did not find him.

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Puerto Rican? I would’ve guessed Jewish.

A former coworker of mine cannot hear himself. This is the only expla-nation I have. I hoped for a bathtub to fall through the ceiling and end our conversation. Wow, I’d say, plaster raining down on us. Did you see that? No tub came. You’ve got the nose for it, the man said. Who knows what I said next? (Does anyone ever know what they said next?) I spent a year crafting the perfect response. If I was prepared, I could have shocked him out of his prejudicial shorthand — delivered a swift, incisive comeback. Turns out we are never training for the chal-lenge that comes. The next one came veering at me sideways — freight derailed, clamoring soundlessly from a blindspot. Nothing worse than a Puerto Rican who doesn’t know Spanish, said the Puerto Rican cook at the Brooklyn restaurant where I used to wait tables. I was not ready. Hey, I said. Smoke rose from the griddle. Hey. I know Spanish. Why didn’t I continue rolling silverware? He moved his hands skillfully over the silver tins of shredded cheese and pulled pork. He took a knife the size of my arm and cut the fat off a darkened piece of meat. No, he said. No, you don’t. I stood there for what felt like too long, power draining from me — the opportunity to reply came and went. I stood there until I felt my body again; sciatic pain shooting down my thighs, feet swampy in my nonslip shoes. Was he right? After all, I knew what he was talking about. Real Spanish — the kind I’d never learn because I was here. Already twenty-something and counting, on my way to refill a woman’s water glass.

But you’re a brown person,

said a friend of mine. Wouldn’t you agree? We were waiting in line for hot chicken. The buzz from half-price well drinks was wearing off and the air around us had parted in a way that imbued him with answers. His authority on the subject of Me came with an enviable ease. Like watching someone toss a soiled spoon into a sink without looking. I don’t know, I measured. Not really. We ordered our meals and sat down at an off-kilter table. Our cloudy Poland Spring bottle caps, two cataracts lodged between our fingers, tapping cheaply on the dark table between us. A metallic shuffle trailed from the kitchen. The jangle of a register. He asked me to elaborate. I don’t know, I repeated. I’m still trying to figure this out, but even that felt like giving up.

Remember that creepy man who lives across the hall?

My mother wants to know. In this memory, I put her in the kitchen

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cooking dinner: rice and beans and abuela’s sofrito. My mother is Irish-English-German and a better Latina than I am. Salsa plays from the stereo. She’s moving her hips back and forth as she stirs. I know the man she’s referring to — his elevator small talk is incongruous. Simultaneously invasive and chilly. Good news: he is moving out. And you know what’s weird? she says. He’s Puerto Rican. Can you believe it? I give an unaffected response because this doesn’t seem particularly believable or unbelievable. It’s not like I seem very Puerto Rican either, I challenge. She puts down the spoon and looks at me, her face contorted with frustration or pain. I have attacked a part of her that she believes we share. Of course you do, she says, since after my father, being Puerto Rican has always meant being easy to love.

A name is a million questions.

It’s a theory I am working with. What are the million questions a name contains?

Have you learned the proper way to cook lamb? When will you visit your grandfather’s grave? Where do you store your receipts? How does the sun play off your hair? At what age will you have to start taking blood pressure medicine? Who taught you how to ask for what you need? What parts of you are invisible, even to yourself? How big is the house of your ancestors? Have you ever been locked within? If so, did you press an ear against the wall and strain to hear the murmurs from the other side? How many parts are there to a whole? And if spectacle is an effort toward wholeness, how big would your marching band be?

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort toward wholeness.

I think she is right, except for the times when it is about revenge. Look what I made, despite your leaving.

I don’t actually feel that way.

I want to clarify this immediately. Sometimes you have to write some-thing down just to know how it feels in your hands.

I thought I was an artist, but then I realized I was just sad.

My friend said this to me one night after we had already spoken the things that were easiest to speak. It was a strange thing to say to another artist. So what did you do? I asked, pressing the phone to my ear. She said that she started taking prescription medication. There’s a lot more

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space in my head now. Like the clutter is gone. I thought that was an interesting idea. What do you do with the space? I asked. Nothing, she said. Normal things. I sleep.

The last time I saw him, I think, was in an airport. Small, silver T-shapes ascending slowly into the sky. People with hat-hair walking through metal detectors wearing garish, piebald socks they believed, until then, would be for their eyes only. My mother and brother and I were leaving town.

Hear me when I say that none of us knew. We were focused on finding our gate. Waving goodbye too quickly.

Carla Isabella

is a name with it’s own etymology — one I recently set out to learn. Carla has close historical ties to the name Charles, whose Germanic roots translate to “a man,” while Isabella is a variation on the name Elizabeth, meaning “devoted to God.” So it is settled. I am a man devoted to God.

To uncover the meaning of your name in 2018 (a time when celebrities have called their babies things like Ode Mountain, Heiress Harris, and River Rocket) seems outdated, superstitious even. Relevant only in the eras of muddling rose petals, bird feathers, and toenails. A time of hocus pocus — of palm-reading and spell-casting. What purchase does any of this have on life today? History happens so quickly — the Internet revises the events of yesterday, time is compressed like a fever dream, all meaning is relative, a name is sound, a skree then a splash!

We were waving goodbye too quickly.

In her book Our World, Mary Oliver says “attention is the beginning of devotion.” We are devoted to our jobs, our weight-loss regimens, silky-faced Instagram influencers, not what she said but how she said it! We are devoted to our memory, to living backwards and forwards. To problems of being underwhelmed. We sleepwalk, placing something on the altar we cannot see.

Every year that goes by, I de-capitalize another word in my dictionary. Career, career. Family, family. Love, love. Some things, I’ve learned, are best understated. But Attention — the slippery, invisible, uncooperative force deserves the A. How else does one look beyond oneself? Approach wholeness? Amidst loss and creation, it’s where we end and begin.

If you think that I forgot you, Carla Imelda, you are wrong.

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I read his e-mail three times before responding. Maybe part of me did think he’d forgotten; will we ever trust that we are entirely unforget-table? Will we ever allow ourselves to eschew diversion and disguise? There is a small, interior room behind my eyes where I hide the worst of me. A little dictator who never rests. She is performing jumping jacks, even now.

I am glad to scan the e-mail, prove her wrong, rub a pie in her face. I sense his love through the blue light of my screen. Take that! This kind of love stems from an unmitigated attention, devotion, like a grandfather’s. Completely undeserved. For a vague, partial-person. Open the interior door. Take a long look, love asks.

It’s a new year. Winter falls hard and dark on the sky. Airplanes leaving New York brighten overhead, slicing the clouds in slow motion. Our stories are not unique: somewhere, someone is always leaving. Open the door to disappearance — the forever fracture. Call it someone else’s, call it your own, but the fact is we’ve never been able to shut this out. Lower your fists, keep the door open.

NotesEtymologies can be found at behindthename.com and — I know, I know — babycenter.

com.

Wisdom from Charles D’Ambrosio is culled from the acknowledgements section of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams.

Madeleine L’Engle published Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art in 1972.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem The Art of Disappearing.

Anne Sexton kept a small journal, produced later as “The Poet’s Story.” This particular entry was from January 1, 1972.

Mary Oliver’s quote on attention appears in her book Our World, published in 2007.

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Nate Marshall

telling storiesa few times each yeari am convinced of the endof singleness, the beginningof a singularity, i become convincedof the infinite curve of love.

my grandma, like all Black grandmothersperhaps, told me do not tell stories,by which she meant do not lie except we couldn’t say “lie,”which was a curse word in her house.

my grandma, like all Black grandmothersperhaps, told me stories about where we werefrom, & who we were from, & the unbroken stringof happy accidents & hapless miracles that made us possible.

my grandma used to say worse thing in the world a liar or a thief,& i know i have been both these most deplored before.

my grandma used to say i love you.

my grandma gone.my convictions gone too.does that mean an endto the long curve of her loveor mine?

does that mean i love youis always bound to end upa story? if so what kind?the worst thing orone of the small impossibilitiesthat put us here.

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the best story is about home because that’s the story part

so tell me what you call me when i’m not around. — Noname

often i be out &about the wordsmoving quotes to the folkslike a fix.

don’t understand?

feel me this way:the other day i was walkingthrough the old hood to seeme in the cheap duplexes& all the wrong houses werevacant &some of our board upswere blooming with new boys.

the last time i went to the church of my birthall the old folks looked the same kindof hard starched sharp they always been& i been gone so long nobodyasked where i been.

look, every time i show upat the functionit’s a surpriseparty to my homies.

all i call my peopleis what i say in they absence.

peep the props i cop from how hardi represent the spots i hardly hitbut hail from.

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feel me: she told me i didn’tgive her my best hours & i told herhere’s more & started pulling clocksout my pockets & she said it’s timeto go ‘head on.

slave grammarLol Chicago slang be dumb as hell Whole time & don’t nobody be knowing how to explain what it mean we all just got a understanding — @_GOMP on Twitter 27 Jul 2014

this not proper,this people.this a failing schoolmeet a magnet program.trick question,they kin.this no question,this answer—ancestral.this be habitual.this the dirty wordslined up in they baddest fits.this that this thatbad meaning _____you know what i mean.you know what i’m sayingwhole time i’m bending the languagelike a bow every arrow is spinning itselfa new sharp tip. whole timei’m writing this down its obsoletingitself. whole time we talking we ain’t gotno dictionary we guessing the spellingwe deciphering the phrases throughour slurs we slurring like we ain’t sure until

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we murmur a sure vow. whole timewe blur the whole thingwe make shambles of their standardswe stand on them& fashion an abolitionin diction.

with thanks to Sean DesVignes

24 Kenyon Review

Susan Stinson

SlowOne night at a play, I walked outside with a friend during intermission. I sat on a low concrete step because my knees hurt. My friend didn’t sit. Some people he knew came over to us. I didn’t know them. I’ve learned the hard way that if I am below eye level with someone I don’t know well, my social presence is reduced or erased. I like to be fully present. I am a fat woman in my fifties with arthritis. Getting up from the low step would take some time.

As I shifted toward one knee, they all looked down at me with alarmed expressions as they murmured, “Don’t get up.”

I wanted to get up. It was already proving to be harder to do than I had expected. None of the others were fat. I listened to the murmurs, watching their faces and feeling as if I needed to calm their discomfort at the same time I was working to stand. I wasn’t acrobatic enough that night to do both.

The first pressure I put on my knee made me wince, so I put my palms down on the step, turned my torso, and straightened my knees, slowly lifting my hips.

I was very aware of my belly. Shame was there, along with annoy-ance with all of them, and a wish to be generous, to make the moment easier. I also had a feeling of such difference, of finding myself out of the category of a casual interaction and into the category of — what? — a problem. I felt tension about my lack of ease with such a basic physical experience as getting up. I also thought that it was all a little funny, that it was no big deal. I really wanted to go take Motrin before I went back to sit in the tight theater seat. I felt sadness because something that had been easy for me was becoming hard. All of this was mixed with thoughts about the play and also a thought about how much of what I was experiencing wasn’t ever going to find its way into words.

I began to walk myself up with my hands on concrete, butt in the air. There was more time than I wanted in which to think. The others

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were still murmuring. My friend half reached for me, then stopped.I am slow. I move slowly. I walk slowly. I write slowly. I am not often

slow enough to see a moment drop its allegiance to sequence and let wild layers of meaning rush out, geysers of the eternal transforming the insistent landscape of the daily. As I slid my palms across the gritty concrete, I was almost that slow.

The eternal is an old-fashioned idea. In The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, Erazim Kohák wrote: “Eternity here does not refer to an endless prolongation of linear time, as it often does in common usage. It indicates, rather, the aware-ness of the absolute reality of being, intersecting with the temporal sequence of its unfolding at every moment.”

Time shifted as my fingertips left the concrete.I’ve been stubborn in offering up the gifts of long stories for those

who can tolerate slowness. I am trying my best to say something with the tools I have. I love the life-changing pleasures of reading a novel, but am terrified of asking for such patience in a world in which minds go skipping through cyberspace.

Talking about the quality of slowness in my stories feels a little bit like talking about why I’m fat and whether or not my fatness caused my arthritis. One of the things being a lesbian has taught me is that only those qualities not widely perceived as normal are interrogated to discover what made them the way they are. I come back, then, to some of the things I know I am: Fat. Halt. Slow. Within these things, in writing, in walking, in pain, in discovery, in any given moment I am ringing like a bell, hollow, clappered, clamorous, musical, alarm-ing, shivering with waves of all that I don’t know but can sense. Time dissolves.

I moved my feet closer together on the concrete and raised my head.I want to speak plainly as a gift to the other fat, halt, and aging

among us, and for the young who can’t live within the stories the dominant culture tells on us. I fear isolation. I fear poverty. I fear being punished for not spending more of my life regretting my physical shape.

Those fears, they have fuel. I live here, within my own limitations, within the limitations of an explicitly vindictive culture. But the story of everything that I am afraid of shifts with the most startling agility to the story, the stories, of skin brushing against concrete, which is rasping and warm; of the life between me and another slow person (also, amazingly, some who are fast); of the shaft of time that opens into the eternal, into all that can be known and experienced here, now, by me. We have all the stories, or, no, there is history, there are

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imbalances of power, there are inheritances of thought and culture. None of us has every story, but I have a body: slow, aching, and fat. It arches, I arch, out into time as if my body were a limb, something grown, something made, turning light into food, stories into smoothly bending joints, time into flesh that plants its palms on the concrete step and walks itself up on its hands like a baby righting itself, like a full-grown woman experiencing new degrees of slowness who rises, turns, and says, “Hello.”