The Liquidity of Loss
The girl had a blue ribbon in her hair, which was designed to say all you needed to know about her.
She looked like something from Malory Towers. She wore polished patent leather shoes with buckles and ankle-length white socks.
She entered the club and ordered a Sailor Jerrys. Whilst waiting, she removed a hairbrush from her satchel, and smoothed it over the already-sleek pony tail.
I sloshed the rum into a glass for her and slid it across the counter.
‘Why am I always dreaming of losing things in water?’ She asked.
‘Like what?’
‘Like my mobile phone. I keep having variations on the same dream. I’m swimming, and it slips from my grasp, and I reach for it, but my limbs move too slowly, as though through jelly, and the phone sinks down until I can’t see it anymore, and the water is darker the deeper you look.’
‘Do you live near the sea?’
‘No,’ she responds, ‘although my father was a sailor. My mother was the whore he docked his ship in.’
I shrug, slightly uneasily, unsure of whether she is joking. ‘Sounds pretty selfexplanatory.’
She has been looking into the drink, swirling the caramel coloured liquid by moving the glass in circles, and now she lifts her chin, and for the first time meets my eye. Her gaze is somehow both steady and lilting, but there is something dead in it, as though the light has gone out.
‘Nothing about what I just said was self-explanatory.’
In that moment, I thought I had her pegged. She was a cryptomaniac: one of the tribe of terribly modern, slightly ethereal and self-consciously kooky girls who cruise bars in the now time, since the great tragedy, spewing superficial riddle fragments mixed with quasi-profound truths or early personal revelation in an attempt to seduce men, to draw them into the dangerous magnetic thrall of wanting to know more.
How wrong I was.
Still, I should have known it was doomed. I should have known from the way the ribbon was tied, so neatly, over the dark waterfall of hair.
So why did I go with her? I guess, life was kind of slow back then, and a small, violent something seemed preferable to an endless stretch of nothing-much.
I was not looking for a lighthouse to guide me safely to the shore. I was looking for an excuse to dash my body on the rocks.
Her name was Ella.
***
Friday Morning
this incoherence
is surely only temporary
I remember laughter
and her lips while laughing
endpapers
and turned-down corners
I part-remember
conversations
about…
…actually, I forget what
love, probably
and its predicable inconsistency
I remember glimpses
of an origami master at work
of cloud formations
of a cancelled TV show
of board games
with coloured counters
I remember finding
a telephone number
written on the back
of a train ticket
I reach for the phone
The Snowball
We are hot focaccia
We are glistening Tarmac
We are fighting more than ever
You say It is just the weather
Come autumn we’ll be fine
By Christmas, happy
Right now I can’t stand to look at you
It is hotter than hell
There is no air.
We are too bright to look at
I am slipping in and out of my siesta.
I hear the weather forecaster on the news
The ground is parched
The toddlers getting ratty
The youths rutting in the street
It is just weather. I tell you. No
The symptom is just a definition of a word
that has nothing to do with its meaning.
We don’t realise where we are
Of course we don’t. That’s part of it.
It is the fifth day in.
The fights regenerate as though
they had cogs and nuts of steel.
Your skin is neon raw.
The weatherman is on the news.
You don’t notice the way his hair
is whipped over adjacent temples.
You think it just might be the fashion.
Yes. The hottest consecutive day.
Would you believe it?
You do. We both do.
We have no choice
You think we should never have come.
Should have taken your mother’s advice.
Not travelled here on hubris, like Icarus,
but what’s the point of a holiday if you don’t get baked?
Is this a dream?
The way that if one falls asleep
to the radio in-between vibrations
the news gets threaded into the dreamy fabric?
And that’s when we see it on the screen.
And what’s this? Small and round,
white flakes caked into a misshapen orb,
it is hurtling through the heat.
The thing is we make this whole metaphor
Just to be able to say something
Let’s not communicate in poems
and idiomatic dreamscapes.
I think it
inauspicious and confusing.
***
a shadow for a bookmark
reading in the sun
accompanied by the hum
of wings
and stings
I find a line
that changes everything
The Story of You
You were born in a hospital whose name you do not remember. You grew up, made choices, fell in love, stopped. It does not matter. You do not actually exist. Not the way this book would suggest. Neatly organized. Chronological. Indexed.
It’s a work of revisionism, after the fact. Over and over again, you will see yourself have
the best sex you ever had. Each time, the meaning in the carnal seems more elusive, and so a glimmer of new understanding becomes a small, perfect victory, the other victories like faded stars lightyears of words away. Lies, is what I’m saying. This work, you, is a fiction.
Sometimes you will surprise yourself and think, this shouldn’t happen. You are the
author. You will get frustrated when things don’t go your way. But this is only half the
story.
You may be read once, you may be read several times by the same person. You may be
picked up many times, and only lose your reader in that difficult middle section. You’ve
known for a long while you should have trimmed it. It is pretentious, lacking selfawareness, over confident, but you refused to change. You believed one day you’d find the perfect reader. And who knows, perhaps you will. So this is the story of you. But only half the story.
Open yourself. Get read.
***
Thomas Everly was born in Portland, Oregon in 1968, the third of four sons. He studied Literature at MIT and shortly after graduating he married his childhood sweetheart. They had three children together.
Everly’s first novel, The Seventeen Deaths of Timothy Edwards, was published to huge critical acclaim when he was just 24 years old. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was described by Joseph Heller as ‘the best debut novel since mine’. Despite great anticipation over its followup, Everly repeatedly missed his publisher’s deadlines and eventually announced that he was retiring from writing in a message posted on his website in 1999.
In February 2003, Everly left the family home to purchase some cigarettes from a nearby convenience store. He never returned. However, every year since then, on August 1st (Everly’s birthday), his agent has received a typewritten manuscript of a new novel with
instructions for the royalties to be paid to his abandoned dependents.
All of these books have gone on to be New York Times bestsellers and one, Jennifer Winters Wants to Kill You, was made into an Oscar-winning movie directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Carey Mulligan as Jennifer.
Imagined Reactions to the Grand Reveal
‘Hey God! You’ve got something in your eye!’
‘In the upper world
There is an infant child
Scratching at a picture of the London skyline with her mother’s
Glitter eye pencil.’
‘It always amazes me what can be done overnight
with a little bit of elbow grease
and a lot if media coverage.’
‘It is not real.
It is simply a building.’
‘Banksy has outdone himself.’
‘Is the point to make something that already looks broken
so the terrorists’ don’t bother?
Like inoculating the skyline against threat?’
‘A thousand monkeys
With a thousand pieces of glass and sound architectural training…
although I guess it depends on the monkeys’
‘Violence is beautiful
Violence costs.’
‘A poison dart
Flying skywards
With terrible velocity’
‘The observatory suite: a perfect location for romantic dinners
Or even late nights working, buoyed up the grand vista,
Or if of a musical persuasion, to practice the fiddle
Whilst cities hiss and fizzle.’
‘Hey God, if you blink
perhaps we can get it out?’
***
their London
existed in fragments
a series
of stolen nights
in unfamiliar buildings
and mornings drowned
by the silent origami
of hotel sheets
and breakfast napkins
but never an afternoon
never the warm boredom
of the everyday
never the monotony
of love
***
POSTCARDS
She started sending me postcards. Stamped. Second class. Through the regular mail. The first one arrived while we were having breakfast.
I looked at her over my Cheerios. She glanced back but said nothing.
I ate quietly.
That night we made love noisily.
The next morning, another postcard.
She was still in bed. I was tempted to storm up the stairs and confront her but I had to catch the early train for a meeting. I left the card on the sideboard. When I returned that evening it had gone. In its place was a flyer for a pizza delivery service and a book of stamps. When I opened it there were four missing.
No postcard the next day.
Or the day after that.
Things seemed to return to normal. We navigated our way through conversations and meals and furniture without incident. She made no reference to her correspondence. I began to think I had imagined the whole thing.
Then, another.
I suggested a night on the town. A meal followed by a movie or show. She pleaded tiredness and went to bed early with the new Anne Tyler novel. She was sleeping when I climbed in beside her, her breathing regular and even. I dreamt of escalators and sandwiches and awoke to this.
As I left the house I noticed her shoes by the front door, a new pair I hadn’t seen before.
The postman greeted me with a cheery wave at the top of the road.
#FirstWorldTorments
@Tantalus
I swear every time I hit refresh it says the pizza’s going to take longer
@Eurydice
Please walk further ahead, I don’t want people to know we’re together
@Tiresias
Blind date. Worst luck. Amazing foresight to arrange it somewhere dark
@Prometheus
I wish I’d never learnt about liver regeneration #shouldhaveturneddownthatthirdprosecco
@Sisyphus
I usually love meatballs but God this is an uphill struggle
@Narcissus
Online dating. Underwhelmed. Literally one. And they’re ignoring all my messages
@Gordius
Someone used up all the conditioner and now I’ve broken a comb
@Alexander @Gordius
Scissors?
@Midas
Any ideas how to get fake tan off your fingers? Supposed to have a big dinner tonight
@Icarus
Dad was right about budget. Too hot and I’m not convinced about safety procedures
@Arachne
Athena’s pissed. Should have deleted my web history
Of course it’s not all bad news…
@Theseus @Ariadne
Thanks for the offer but I’ve got GPS
***
After The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
He asked you to
‘pretend to be scandinavian.’
Scandinavian how?
Dramatic forests? Alienated fjords?
Sociopathic landscapes?
Mass mutilation?
Jokes. You know the way
the wind is blowing:
the big skies cast
a vision of
Lisbeth, who mesmerises
with facially pierced
recklessness.
You cannot argue.
It’s the more serious trouble.
Once you start to pretend
the next thing,
you’re gloss
you’re in a film,
you’re remade by David Fincher.
(Created from TimeOut London, January 5-11 2012, page 50 ‘How to write a Nordic bestseller’ by Barry Forshaw)
***
(Taken from DOR: A Journal of Romanian Non-Fiction, Issue Two Winter 2011/12)
No Man is an Island
A Trio
1. Why I Keep Drinking
I want to apologize
(for losing my temper)
you looked lovely on your birthday
(for that thing I said about your mother)
especially your hair
I am grateful for my loving family
(sorry about the handwriting)
(on the train)
but when I hear the fizz
the clink of the metal disc on the ground
when I taste the bitter fizz
when I fill my mouth with
this thing that you hate
I feel this is how I hold on
you know
to me
that this is the part of me you can’t have
and I want to say fuck you
fuck the weekly sessions
fuck the embarrassing you in front of your friends
you can’t have me
you can’t have all of me
2. In The Clinic
The slip said
I’m sorry, you’ve been cursed.
Can you think of anything
You might have done to deserve it?
Well there was that time
I sold my baby to a troll
And couldn’t remember his name.
It could be that.
3. Pour Femme / Pour Homme
***
A word about endings
A tanka
On nights like these, air
rich with bonfires and cuntjuice,
we should remember
they live in ashes, not flames:
happily ever afters.
traces of her
a tanka
she, in palimpsest.
a strand of hair ampersands
yesterday’s pillow.
a disturbance in the air,
silence through which she has moved.
Scales
So you haven’t gained weight. Great. But you haven’t lost any.
Good thing you bought that dress that makes you look slimmer than you are.
What? The wash? Oh well.
Just keep smiling. You are pretty when you smile.
Perhaps your positivity will attract a tall and handsome man.
Juice
Can you taste the Californian Vitality?
You are obviously a person who cares about their health.
That’s why you choose JuicicalicoTM - the only way to start the day!
You know there is a more vibrant, happier, more energetic version of you just trying to get out…
Freshly squeezed, this morning!
Lotus
You know what your problem is.
Life is hectic.
You prioritize the life of your mind - derailing your body.
What you need is yoga.
To focus your energy.
Make time.
Relax.
No, not like that. No, don’t think of anything.
Empty your mind.
Do it. Don’t try.
Egg
Start the day on an egg. That’s what your mother always said.
In your head you’ve conflated two occasions.
The yellow centres oozing across the supermarket floor - and sitting on the kerb - her hand on your back as you shook, saying,
Everyone knows they are fragile. It’s still a shock when they break.
Pill
Religion is the opium of the people.
But if we don’t have religion then what choice do we have but drugs?
A small tab of chalk. A glass of water. Absolution in 40 mgs.
You want to be stronger than this, I can tell. But want is not a pill.
Mouse
He was the first boy who noticed you weren’t actually American.
Who recognised the lilt in your voice as residue from the International School.
Where no-one liked you. Too quiet. Oddly dressed.
You should be working, but you find yourself clicking and clicking, following the trail of bright blue links, burrowing under the surface of the internet like a child lost under a duvet, trying to find the light.
Money
Wow. This feels really good, actually. Putting the card into the machine. Listening to whirr like the flutter of a mother dove.
They add that sound, you know. So you don’t panic. Just like they add the red colouring to ketchup. It should be green. Ketchup should be green and money should be silent. What a topsy turvy world!
Steak
Your dad was vegetarian, so every-time you fork meat into your mouth your stomach lurches as though it’s his body you are feasting on.
What would Freud say? You bet you’d wouldn’t have daddy issues now if you hadn’t ever read Freud.
Surely that’s some kind of fallacy.
Fuck Freud. Drink up.
Flower
He bought you flowers. He’d remembered - lilacs were your favorite.
You were young. You thought the fact he paid attention meant that you were special.
But they were educated guesses. Not personal. Easy to do.
You saw what you wanted to see.
Any magazine can pull the same trick. Check the horoscopes.
Shot
He likes you. He really likes you. He wouldn’t be looking at you if he didn’t. Go on. Say something.
Be prepared to throw everything away, everything, in an instant. Just to feel his fingers find you, his tongue in your mouth.
Rich and dark like the sweet alcoholic forget.
Smartphone
I’m not your friend. I don’t have anything to say to you personally. I’m just - you think we’re in some kind of relationship, but we’re not. Just because we talk every day. But, I don’t care about you. And these friends are not your friends either.
Tampon
I know, I know, I get in the way of everything. But he wasn’t really that in to you anyway. Why would he be? Look at you. Swollen body, bloated, irrational. It’s not my fault. Please, stop crying. We’ll talk more in the morning.
PERSONAL ADS
