Photograph by Nancy Crampton.

Over a morning cappuccino in a small but lively European café that spilled onto the central square of a town near the sea, I first read “The Country Husband,” my introduction to John Cheever, on a website I later discovered was inaccessible in the U.S. The website, all in Arabic except for the stories, was an arsenal of midcentury American fiction, a canon I had resisted knowing anything about.

I was, at the time, in a phase of my development as a poet that I would call fiction-averse. I thought poetry was what you discovered, like a rare ore, when you unbuckled the artifice that contained language in narrative. Naturally, then, I tried to write poems that rejected anything that might pass for fiction: smooth, grammatical sentences, captivating or manipulative plotlines, and, most egregious, the implicit desire to wrangle language into utter invisibility while the reader watches a movie in her head.

“The Country Husband” was, at least by reputation, so exactly what I’d been avoiding that I’m not quite sure why I chose to punish myself by reading it. The story concerns a man, Francis Weed, who lives in Cheever’s invented Westchester town, Shady Hill, with his wife and children. Weed falls in love with the babysitter, the most cliché thing a married suburban father can do. She doesn’t love him back, and he doesn’t change his life for her, and that’s the story. He must learn to live past this rupture in his heart.

When I read the story, I was convalescing from an affair with a married person. I did love him back, and he didn’t change his life for me, and since you can’t heal at home from a heartbreak nobody knows about, I had gone abroad. Nothing in my life seemed to be working, and I must have searched up Cheever as part of my attempt to try the opposite of everything I had been doing. I had to admit that in the mirror “The Country Husband” held up to me, I appeared a little less broken than I felt. Writing from Francis Weed’s point of view, Cheever had, at a time when I really needed it, validated my experience of how powerful and real and obliterating extramarital love can be—even and especially for the married party. This, by the way, was years before the ubiquity of open marriages made moot the need for affairs, the way de Tocqueville has described the democratic election’s quelling the need for violent revolution. But the impulse to escape, resist, defy; the flirting with destruction, complete overhaul, change—this doesn’t go away just because one container for it has gone licit. Read More

Fireworks in Eberhardzell, 2018. Photograph by Andreas Weith. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When I met Richard, he said, “I’m not a Cartesian. I feel no division between my body and my mind. I don’t even think my mind is confined to my brain. I think it’s everywhere in my body and even outside me.” I said, “Me too.” That was nineteen years ago. He said, “The right hand can’t give the left hand a gift.” I thought it could, although maybe you would need to be an octopus. He said, “You can’t jump into the same river once.” That was obvious.

On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You make resolutions you can’t keep—on purpose. You promise to be reborn, but you like your funk. And it’s so much easier to let yourself down than to let down another person. Richard says, “Every promise invites a change of heart,” and when he says this I feel a wave of love for him rise up, or a wave of love for the human mind and the pleasure it takes in maintaining its shape.

I’m making Richard sound like the wooden fortune teller in the penny arcade, where you slip a coin into a slot and she spits out a fortune-cookie saying. This is a compliment to Richard. The fortune teller knew a thing or two. Every promise of course invites a change of heart. Last year, when we got married, we promised nothing. Read More

Photograph courtesy of Adelaide Faith.

CAVEH

Ever since I was five years old, I’ve been obsessed with finding a romantic partner. I believe that the purpose of life is to join with others and my main goal in life has always been to find a life partner. Unfortunately, this quest has proven elusive and I have been divorced three times. After my last divorce, at the age of fifty-seven, I found myself dating mostly twentysomethings, not because I was especially drawn to twentysomethings but because they were the only ones who seemed drawn to me. My last several girlfriends all approached me as fans after a film screening or messaged me on Instagram. They’ve been the only ones who have seemed interested.

ADELAIDE

I hadn’t had a boyfriend for eight and a half years. In all that time I’d only had two dates. They were both with the same person, but they were a girl on the first date and a boy on the second. I found that interesting, but nothing else about them. On the first date they told me they liked to wear odd socks. Between dates they sent me a selfie with a sock on each ear. I don’t know why I agreed to the second date. It was something to do, and maybe I wanted to experience not being the needy one for once. Maybe I thought I’d enjoy acting cold, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It was easy to get rid of them in the end. I told them I didn’t believe in romance. “I don’t think anybody really loves anybody,” I said toward the end of the second date. “They just pretend they do to secure backup. They want someone on their side in case they’re struck down by misfortune.” I believed that was true at the time.

CAVEH

After my breakup with Kathy, who had been twenty-four when I met her and twenty-seven when we broke up, I was lonely and single again. I was more famous than I’d ever been, so getting laid was a little easier than it used to be, but not by much. After a few demoralizing one-night stands, I met Kate, who was also twenty-seven. She emailed me asking if I could teach her how to appreciate poetry. I googled her. She was cute. So I offered to meet her over Zoom and read through a poem together. My main motivation was romantic. But I wanted to meet over Zoom because I was worried that (1) she might be crazy (I attract a lot of them), or (2) that I was projecting my own desires onto her. But I enjoy close readings of poems, so I figured the worst that could happen was that I deepen my knowledge of poetry.

ADELAIDE

It was hard to find anyone I was interested in. My capacity for being interested in someone had been absorbed by my therapist for so many years, and this had been all projection. Since I wasn’t able to get to know her, she couldn’t fall short of my ideal. Whenever I told a friend I’d been single for eight years they acted like I must be mistaken. It seemed an impossibility to them, just unthinkable. But what did they mean? Was there some specific practical thing they would have done that I hadn’t, which would have prevented my being single? Or did they think interesting people had been appearing right under my nose but I’d refused to really see them? Nobody had interested me in all those years. I’m sure my friends could easily imagine experiencing one single day of not meeting anyone they wanted to date, so why not three thousand consecutive days? That’s what had happened to me. Read More

Balthazar in the nineties. Photo by James Leynse/Corbis, via Getty Images.

It was lunchtime at the restaurant. Sunlight streamed through the blinds, cutting the halogens from the side so you could see everyone’s lines and shadows and they could see yours. It was loud, and the air between me and the customers was caffeinated. Lunches were always rush, rush, rush. They gave us twice as many tables as they did at dinner, and I was usually behind on orders, showing up at the table pale and sweaty. At dinner, there was the wine haze. The lights were dimmer, and you could duck in and out of view. Dinner meant grappa and lingering and more time to charm the customers. At lunch, we turned our tables fast—it was the fall of 1997, and the crowds kept coming. I was twenty-six, with a bunch of other lives behind me—or beside me, or in front of me. Balthazar had just opened that April. I lied on my resume and I had the look.

I checked the floor plan. I was penciled to work the big tables. The VIP section was easy to spot, and everyone wanted a seat at the red banquettes that lined the back wall. Was this a mistake? It was probably a test. Back then, the restaurant was always testing us, and we never knew if our customers were plants.

Balthazar wanted stars from a New York Times review, and the general managers trained us to get them. One of the higher-ups (I’ll call her Debra) told us the restaurant hired an outside service to dine anonymously and rate the staff. If I hear something like this, I will approach every table with suspicion, asking myself, Are they a little too attentive? Too plainclothed? Too curious about the menu? Are they exchanging knowing glances after I mispronounce the name of a cheese or let a water glass sit empty while they thrum their fingers against it?

I smoked a lot in those days and ate Clif Bars I’d stuff into the pockets of my apron. I looked like a French maid in my uniform. I bought black loafers with the thickest heels I could find. You think restaurant work is easy? You probably don’t think that. Maybe you think it’s hard, but honestly, if you haven’t served at a place like Balthazar in the nineties, you have no idea.

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New York City Marble Cemetery interior. Photograph by Dmadeo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In issue no. 253, we published an excerpt of Eileen Myles’s “Bird Watching,” a poem written in 1978 and unpublished until now. In this essay, Myles reflects on the time when they wrote it—alongside drinking and dancing and falling in love in New York. “It was a movie for sure,” they write.

I think Chelsea Girls is me teaching myself to be a novelist and Bird Watching [and Their First Three Books of Poetry] is me teaching myself to be a poet. Poets have the same rights as all other humans, but each of us in our own exact way has made that be our business. Possibly even being the lawyer of it. Constructing reality inch by inch in language. Making a new space I believe. All poetry is hyperbole. That can’t possibly be true, but it is.

Excepting “Bird Watching,” which I think is the main heave of this volume, the three books here are sort of young me taking my measure, figuring out what I’ve got. This is so different from a selected, because it’s not so much about what matters but what I did. And across it all the person is variously asserting their gender and the blurriness of that enterprise (I’m heartened to see that in my twenties I really didn’t feel I fit in this or that gender. Or sexuality). And gender and genre are linked as always, because despite these being my first public assertions of being a poet, the person making them would often have preferred to be a journalist (wanting to be seen in the world rather than in language) and so the direction of some of the poems’ content feels like I was trying to have it both ways. I mean talking to some imaginary everybody, being fun and broad like the village voice. I even wrote for them a while. And then there’s the self that camped out entirely in feminism, even lesbian feminism, making tons of statements (which embarrassed me and I didn’t include in my selected) sounding to me by now (except for the part about shooting the pope) like a middle-aged man. I was trying to sound like the world or how a lesbian like me sounded in it but the result was some horny geezer, a guy being open about his lust for chicks—yet I was one.

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