How to Go Home, and: A Victorian Construction, and: Totem and Taboo, and: Trotsky's Hand, and: Swamp Thing

HOW TO GO HOME/Jennifer Michael Hecht You've got to go all the way around the Earth in order to get back to those people: the luminous moon over a bassinet, the great shoe widening out to a leg, the endless torso, the lecturing head. You've got to never go back home but always go home forward, ending every day further onward, away from the good china, away from your carpeted room. Out there, on your way around the Earth: true love appeals to your sense of destination but does not show up, oddly does not come true. You've read that the Neanderthals, according to the DNA, were not supplanted but rather mated with the Sapian Sapians and you and I are the mix. It seems this matter of worrying over with whom to sleep extends backward a good long while, and so little progress! Meanwhile, you've got to get around the Earth. Or some other assignment. It's not altogether arbitrary. You've got to perambulate a lot, that's for certain, and you've got to come at the origins of species from an unheard-of direction: step out into the first kitchen of your consciousness from inside the squat refrigerator, or come up from the drain in the sink. Or walk up to that man in the backyard after having walked away from him down and around the Earth. 34 · The Missouri Review And he still barbecuing! It's unbelievable. Sure, the Neanderthals must have mooned a good bit at the way things turned out, the brooding brow, the pouting jaw, the pollen in the grave. But you've still got to get out of there. They were overtaken, yes, but that's a risk everyone takes when they mate. That has to apply to the women in the capri pants spoon-feeding you strained peas and the guy pausing between setting down his briefcase and putting a key in your door. It's not actually surprising that they wanted sleep so much that they knocked your chatterbox around. Ah, well, go in circles around your violent memories. It is not arbitrary that atoms and galaxies are all described by spinning one fist around the other. The secret is apparently in the process of revolution, around the Earth and up the cellar stairs to some original vision, to some platonic linoleum glare in which truth might be found. And yet you keep just going up the path. As if that could get you anywhere. Jennifer Michael Hecht The Missouri Review · 35 A VICTORIAN CONSTRUCTION/ Jennifer Michael Hecht It's a complicated question starting from one central point and radiating. It starts from the smell of flesh and that smell, once conjured, proceeds to the desire to taste the remembered scent. Someone once said something to each of us. To me he described an auburn swish of satin hair, achingly soft, gathering in a tiny swirl at his lost lover's tailbone. What must he or she have said to you to have incited such desire for me? There was the fur on the face of the girl in French class, in high school, a mild fascination at the time, grown to a cult of blond wisps edged out along the memory of her parchment cheek. Then on through years on wisps we arrive at my personal comprehension of the gentleman stalking Victorian London for a touch; at home, his wife, otherwise reviled of flesh, strokes her own where it joins her pinned-up hair fascinated by the upsweep of its particulate fluidity, its soft redness blushing with silent revelation: the mirror, the ivory brush, the warmth of the room shifting with her proximity to, or distance from, the caged fire and the latticed window. Out there, working-class girls know everything. Two shop girls, getting off at nine, wearing each other's clothes, see him. The four of them (two young girls, one wife, one husband) move with caution 36 · The Missouri Review in the world; each of them in desperate haste, disguised. Each of them, fearing, above all else, the shame of prostitution, and all monitor their behavior for a sign of...