Summertime, Madness

She came here willing, and she resents it. Summer is a collision of melt and regret, masked by obligatory happiness and dragooned production. It feels something like hanging out after high school when you had nowhere else to go. It’s cool for a while—covering your mouth when you laugh, smoking weed in the alley, buying stale sour keys at the convenience store—and then, the hours creep, and you are forced to realize that home is where you don’t want to be. Depressive Toronto porches hide a tart edge. She’s been in many programs.

Look, June is the color green: rich, possible, alive. She remembers teaching fondly; she remembers being a teacher. In the conference room, she is a sweetsop, dissembled into an extremist. She texts her friend a picture of her soiled foot bottoms, impressed by her body’s waste management scheme.

You know that Gwendolyn Brooks poem that goes, and if the sun comes / How shall we greet him? / Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a session with shade?. You know the one, that poem called truth, but she, she knew nothing about it, she hung dead flowers above her bed, she moshed with unbalanced delight in her sleep. In dreams, she buys a pick-up truck, she theorizes kissing, she “goes for coffee.”

Late for obtuse medical appointments, she is learning the ecology of refusal, like a burr stuck to the chapter of half-truths. The job market solemnizes a border, the mass embattled by an unpayable debt to a wan corporation. Swollen. She is a mathematician, concerned with making sadness.

July is a syrupy heart, shimmering dissociation, plastic bead season. Someone donates a carpet to the meeting room. Someone suffers. High on the soliloquy coast, she Googles the length of kitten fostering. She Googles the price of sperm donations.

Boundaries, baby, erect them. Put your book down, somebody mouth said. The department is its own monstrous thing couched in elite politeness and bad taste but buzzing along petals was a bright us, a we under fluorescent largesse: madeleine, magdalene, morgan. She is embarrassed about how alone she feels when the institution is not holding her, when she is not held. At dissertation camp, she is trying not to say too much. Decompose after the surround.

She was being held tightly and then let go—of the bell and the flower—and in Detroit she felt like she could live forever. On the I-94 the leftists became a kind of lightning. But it’s 2011 again, praise the Lord, and she’s wearing banana peppers as rings. Everything is mushy.

And somewhere, a deadline. A colleague wants to “hop on a call.” Burning through the varenicline, she fills out forms at four in the morning, at odds with a thick edge of sex.

August is a long enclosure, unbearable, a somnolent language. Black, burial, un cendrier, etc. Lizardgirl89 pays for her whatever porn.

The West Indies rings the hour before she gets mistaken for a rising sophomore, the year before she gets mistaken for her colleague and only real friend around these parts and, sure, she’ll grab a free sandwich in lieu of acknowledgment of her self-ghettoization.

Here, five girls on the unspeakable rooftop, a parade of pests. Girls do what they do. Girls share about the first time their father figure drew a gun. Girls become bruised heavens. We gift each other new names, a seminar of disgust, fellowshipping over store-bought brokenness. Texts about curried seapuss and like, hey, all wind is pink copper. The sheets fall off the bed, and up in here she runs her pinky over the mattress tufts. Her half-brother’s brother is her brother, she declares. She wants to join the brotherhood. That’s what is called intimate geography. That’s what we call our most tender-tight interaction: do you want a grilled cheese?