from GULF EPISTOLARY

Dear P:

There’s nothing new to say about the ocean, that grotesque centipede. Its ugly, sloshing prayer—which is the noise of us, and is us. In the new year, my hot water heater grinds itself lukewarm so every shower feels like penance for the body’s eagerness to claim dirt as kin. I admit I’ve been avoiding you, the way anyone avoids looking at the deep center wound of a canyon. Absence becomes an object in itself, a kind of optical illusion. Today in class, I told my students: You could’ve been a flower or a marmot or a hot dog cart, but you are a human being with the privilege of language. And they rolled their eyes in excellent displays of boredom. Your daughter is their age, I believe. Where is she, and who are you to her now? You and I—people, women—stake our stories in the grass, try to chip away at the self. But the body is a living text, and always has something new to say. Naming me us, ropeburn of my shoulder pressed to yours, I take your belonging here hostage. You had a son, a daughter. Somewhere you have a daughter. Language hemorrhages in the petri dish of every sensory frame: could’ve been, could’ve been, could’ve been.

***

Dear P:

I have not survived the storylines other people have. My body was never plainly entered without my permission. I fucked someone and my dignity was a hawk nesting without me in inescapable towers. I fucked many someones, my tongue a painted bead, cheap and red and plentiful. The new year was not yet and nothing new. And then it was standing over my bed, shivering like a bracket of train tracks.

***

Dear P:

My body was never plainly entered without my permission. (Which was not mine entirely which I begged all day like a child for new frivolous monumental toy and fled my body once the getting commenced floated above and made noises to transient bedfellows I’m sure did not sound like the hauntings they were how was I to know physicality was not meant to be separate as that tree over there vacillating between numbness and exceptional raw swells of belonging to a roadside median a shoetip the evening meaning loneliness was bottomless and possession began only by lawns sometimes so simple I was allowed to experience tawny car lights as glorious and exceptionally for me) The week of the funeral, D assured us that women in the prison where you live rape each other with broomsticks. This was meant as consolation.

***

Dear P:

Let me tell you the story of the trees: In another life I abandoned my body before the trees, but this is not about that. I bathed myself and cooked soup which I ate for fearsome hollow my stomach’s sake, I cared for myself as one might a turtle cracked by a tire, put myself to bed. But this is not about that either. Young, selfish, inhuman, I sobbed at the thigh of a red oak, let insects chip away irrelevant: take take. As if through their hunger I could build erasure out of me. My telling this helps no one. Yes I was addicted to things I was quiet I kept to myself. No one knew, I didn’t know what to call it how it broke me mindbody as primal whip breaks feral jaw. How much of me is fractured; what chasms to commodify. My telling this helps no one. Unsatisfied with the tour of pre-made hells I built my own. All my paper men and I their sliming architect. Shifty-eyed. Survival-mouthed. The problem of my hell was how I didn’t want to give it away not for anything even a self. How much it’s about me, always, makes this not Art. Also not living; hyperawareness of being is unsustainable without the needy whiplash of complete un-being. My telling this helps no one. I collect quotes about light messy in notebooks; funnel my hands into a nothing god; watch holiness splatter so instantly on any windshield. Truth is, I just built other hells whose walls are quieter, whose stomachs have doors and sometimes I leave them unlocked.

***

P:

Let me tell you a story called Being Loved is a Moat We Tunnel Our Hells Around: I am 25 my stepfather calls me into the bedroom and reflexively I say Am I in trouble. Tells me he’s bonetired, ready to die, tells me where the will breathes in its iron box and I am relieved. Death such a friend, a mutualistic parasitism familiar as a plagiarist study-buddy sometimes weeps into each other’s textbooks to carry home pages of the other’s prized tears. Floodguilt squirmy and horrible: when I was small my mom picked the bumps on my arm, fell asleep in our beds, feet sweated—I burned for her to leave, I shoved my little life away from hers entire I’m sorry. I’m altogether that childhood book with the sad donkey’s ear barbed to its barn door. What value is there in confession, this or anyone’s? I wish I could slink away quiet and do the work, but I am always sticking out my pale tongue to lightning. Your confession rolled like oil from your mouth; the Story goes, you called your sister before he was even cold, moments after his caved face sunk to your carpet. The last time I said I love you to my own sister, you were witness—was as she stepped down from the witness stand.

***

Dear Pam:

Once, my father told me the story of a man who drank a gasoline milkshake and puked in the lit fireplace, making ghosts of his three sleeping sisters. He also liked to tell a story about golf balls. What stories did he tell you? I look up and find myself empty on the beach. A black gull shames its velvet mouth toward the sea. Writing the you of someone, pulling another into this space, is accusatory shorthand for everything I hold bone-close and distance. Last summer, I was sitting on the patio of a pizzeria upstate when my sister called with vengeance in her voice to relay that you’d been transferred to a minimum security house, gotten a lesbian haircut. And how to break such news to our grandmother. Said you were living, she spat, among people. When I put down the phone, L remarked: I’ve never seen you so stern. I promise I am capable of compassion for those unlike myself, those who haven’t had to cart around a Story or survive much of anything. Grief is bodily, blends the senses, the selves—it’s closest to the fabric of poetry itself; it un-makes meaning, draws metaphor into the experience of our bodies as they wrack and wretch around our maypoles of loss. We are all looking for a vessel, a dummy goblet to speak into. Your name is not proof of anything. It does not prove you exist.

***

Pamela:

Your name implies that once, you were young. You were insightful and calm and found power in that. You spit laughter loud, found power stumbling into complete, unbearable aliveness on a moment’s notice. You were probably on a beach, once. Hair whipping streaks across your forehead. K said there’s faith required in taking your clothes off with anyone, trusting they won’t pull a knife out of their boot, that you won’t—or will—get your heart broken, depending on your preference. It’s advice the once-young give. I confess to you here, mother of bullets, narrative revolver spun in skin, things I would not to the kind woman who bled me into this world: Tonight, I slept with a man and we kissed and laughed and danced painted in the great river of my blood. The most revelatory freedom can look like love and can also look like violence and be neither. I hope when I’m older, like you, I will have less to say. I hope I let the wind be itself without comment on its qualities. Like you——What brand of imprisonment will I confess myself into the arms of? Who might I make corpses of to protect their names from my ledger of abandonment? A craving for language sculpts us into near-deities of carnage. How we climb inside the light of one another to mine our most expensive metaphors.

Dear P:

There’s nothing new to say about the ocean, that grotesque centipede. Its ugly, sloshing prayer—which is the noise of us, and is us. In the new year, my hot water heater grinds itself lukewarm so every shower feels like penance for the body’s eagerness to claim dirt as kin. I admit I’ve been avoiding you, the way anyone avoids looking at the deep center wound of a canyon. Absence becomes an object in itself, a kind of optical illusion. Today in class, I told my students: You could’ve been a flower or a marmot or a hot dog cart, but you are a human being with the privilege of language. And they rolled their eyes in excellent displays of boredom. Your daughter is their age, I believe. Where is she, and who are you to her now? You and I—people, women—stake our stories in the grass, try to chip away at the self. But the body is a living text, and always has something new to say. Naming me us, ropeburn of my shoulder pressed to yours, I take your belonging here hostage. You had a son, a daughter. Somewhere you have a daughter. Language hemorrhages in the petri dish of every sensory frame: could’ve been, could’ve been, could’ve been.

***

Dear P:

I have not survived the storylines other people have. My body was never plainly entered without my permission. I fucked someone and my dignity was a hawk nesting without me in inescapable towers. I fucked many someones, my tongue a painted bead, cheap and red and plentiful. The new year was not yet and nothing new. And then it was standing over my bed, shivering like a bracket of train tracks.

***

Dear P:

My body was never plainly entered without my permission. (Which was not mine entirely which I begged all day like a child for new frivolous monumental toy and fled my body once the getting commenced floated above and made noises to transient bedfellows I’m sure did not sound like the hauntings they were how was I to know physicality was not meant to be separate as that tree over there vacillating between numbness and exceptional raw swells of belonging to a roadside median a shoetip the evening meaning loneliness was bottomless and possession began only by lawns sometimes so simple I was allowed to experience tawny car lights as glorious and exceptionally for me) The week of the funeral, D assured us that women in the prison where you live rape each other with broomsticks. This was meant as consolation.

***

Dear P:

Let me tell you the story of the trees: In another life I abandoned my body before the trees, but this is not about that. I bathed myself and cooked soup which I ate for fearsome hollow my stomach’s sake, I cared for myself as one might a turtle cracked by a tire, put myself to bed. But this is not about that either. Young, selfish, inhuman, I sobbed at the thigh of a red oak, let insects chip away irrelevant: take take. As if through their hunger I could build erasure out of me. My telling this helps no one. Yes I was addicted to things I was quiet I kept to myself. No one knew, I didn’t know what to call it how it broke me mindbody as primal whip breaks feral jaw. How much of me is fractured; what chasms to commodify. My telling this helps no one. Unsatisfied with the tour of pre-made hells I built my own. All my paper men and I their sliming architect. Shifty-eyed. Survival-mouthed. The problem of my hell was how I didn’t want to give it away not for anything even a self. How much it’s about me, always, makes this not Art. Also not living; hyperawareness of being is unsustainable without the needy whiplash of complete un-being. My telling this helps no one. I collect quotes about light messy in notebooks; funnel my hands into a nothing god; watch holiness splatter so instantly on any windshield. Truth is, I just built other hells whose walls are quieter, whose stomachs have doors and sometimes I leave them unlocked.

***

P:

Let me tell you a story called Being Loved is a Moat We Tunnel Our Hells Around: I am 25 my stepfather calls me into the bedroom and reflexively I say Am I in trouble. Tells me he’s bonetired, ready to die, tells me where the will breathes in its iron box and I am relieved. Death such a friend, a mutualistic parasitism familiar as a plagiarist study-buddy sometimes weeps into each other’s textbooks to carry home pages of the other’s prized tears. Floodguilt squirmy and horrible: when I was small my mom picked the bumps on my arm, fell asleep in our beds, feet sweated—I burned for her to leave, I shoved my little life away from hers entire I’m sorry. I’m altogether that childhood book with the sad donkey’s ear barbed to its barn door. What value is there in confession, this or anyone’s? I wish I could slink away quiet and do the work, but I am always sticking out my pale tongue to lightning. Your confession rolled like oil from your mouth; the Story goes, you called your sister before he was even cold, moments after his caved face sunk to your carpet. The last time I said I love you to my own sister, you were witness—was as she stepped down from the witness stand.

***

Dear Pam:

Once, my father told me the story of a man who drank a gasoline milkshake and puked in the lit fireplace, making ghosts of his three sleeping sisters. He also liked to tell a story about golf balls. What stories did he tell you? I look up and find myself empty on the beach. A black gull shames its velvet mouth toward the sea. Writing the you of someone, pulling another into this space, is accusatory shorthand for everything I hold bone-close and distance. Last summer, I was sitting on the patio of a pizzeria upstate when my sister called with vengeance in her voice to relay that you’d been transferred to a minimum security house, gotten a lesbian haircut. And how to break such news to our grandmother. Said you were living, she spat, among people. When I put down the phone, L remarked: I’ve never seen you so stern. I promise I am capable of compassion for those unlike myself, those who haven’t had to cart around a Story or survive much of anything. Grief is bodily, blends the senses, the selves—it’s closest to the fabric of poetry itself; it un-makes meaning, draws metaphor into the experience of our bodies as they wrack and wretch around our maypoles of loss. We are all looking for a vessel, a dummy goblet to speak into. Your name is not proof of anything. It does not prove you exist.

***

Pamela:

Your name implies that once, you were young. You were insightful and calm and found power in that. You spit laughter loud, found power stumbling into complete, unbearable aliveness on a moment’s notice. You were probably on a beach, once. Hair whipping streaks across your forehead. K said there’s faith required in taking your clothes off with anyone, trusting they won’t pull a knife out of their boot, that you won’t—or will—get your heart broken, depending on your preference. It’s advice the once-young give. I confess to you here, mother of bullets, narrative revolver spun in skin, things I would not to the kind woman who bled me into this world: Tonight, I slept with a man and we kissed and laughed and danced painted in the great river of my blood. The most revelatory freedom can look like love and can also look like violence and be neither. I hope when I’m older, like you, I will have less to say. I hope I let the wind be itself without comment on its qualities. Like you— What brand of imprisonment will I confess myself into the arms of? Who might I make corpses of to protect their names from my ledger of abandonment? A craving for language sculpts us into near-deities of carnage. How we climb inside the light of one another to mine our most expensive metaphors.

Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, New South, Passages North, TYPO, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. You can find her online at erin-slaughter.com.

Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, New South, Passages North, TYPO, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. You can find her online at erin-slaughter.com.