Excerpts from the poetry manuscript in progress, "Matadors at the Crossing."
Story Guru’s Instructions for Writing During Hurricanes
One: Write what you know.
I’m drowning and the world I know is gone ground under the sea song I gasp to tell what I know
Two: Write from a sense of place. Details!
homes of racing splinters schools of pots washing down the alley streets tables of bloated bellies of cattle the hills in the endless waters last tiny finger he would hold forever girl swept gone
and her last place the sea in her lungs
Three: Find your voice.
You find it m’fuckah! I got it in this howl I’m let loose blasted by the barreling waters my voice would make yours speak the tepid pee water of the thief of the green world and the waters devourer of the air monstrous you be but that voice you drip thin as sorry
Curriculum Vitae for Corona Virus Employment (CV4CV)
She knew how to be poor. She knew how to miss the one element she needed more than any other. When it was hard to get air, she could see it in the eyes. She was a test.
What did she do? Any leadership qualities?
She would surround the results with her arms but she was not magic; block it with her body but she was not medicine. She had hoped for long years that she was but there was the truth in spikes and curves.
She’d find truth marching across endless metal trays in slaughterhouses, clinging to the instruments that would cut throats, dismember, discard the invisible.
She would find truth in her voice but she was no commander.
Real Life Application of Her Skills?That she knew how to be poor did not get anyone the air they needed. Men lay underneath blue armies of thugs, gasping for it. Women ascended, lit up as threatened with fireballs consuming their elements.
She wondered about that gift she’d developed for so many years, one it seemed no one could take away, knowing how to be poor. Knowing how not to have enough air.
That gift seemed not to do a damned thing, really, as a country devoured its nurses, its doctors, its orderlies, its cooks, its cashiers. Its drivers. Its elders. Its harvesters. Its children. Its messengers slicing through the air of empty streets with food, with medicine. What else could she do?
Useless ExtracurricularsShe knew how to fly, though. She knew how to fly through the empty diamonds of the clanging of cages, above a silver sea of weeping and fevers. She could not lift the children out, though. Useless woman.
She knew how to move into water and not rise, lodge herself in the stickiness of river bank while the whole howl of grief that flowed like river was helpless and could not free a child and her father, nor even turn them over to reach the air, the sun. Her voice came forward, but the embrace was already death.
She’d known how to march down a road washed by the tips of the palms and arrive too late, just after the fragments of the village flung themselves like miserable fireworks.
She’d known how to arrive and she learned how to leave.
(unnecessary further education)The foul microbes of the past kept circulating and all about her was the spread of the old hells clearing their throats, practicing their speeches, spewing danger and manifestos.
She knew how to grieve but it was useless. She knew how to fear but it was masked so that no one saw full on the terror that had born her into this world.
Living her purpose, also useless.These were her skills. But she will not be she.
She will be the one who finally gets there on time the one who with her whole being will pull one tiny moon of a child’s nail out of the river to hang over us like the tap of a song.
She would hold the one who will lose her skin as she runs down that road like a story screaming for its echo to be drowned in no sad bloody river but in the eyes of the mirror that has finally been looked into, under the tap of song and the blazing child, the mirror that will hurl lightning at even the thought of repeating what should never have once made nightmare from life.
Really, any accomplishments?Near the golden pier at the windy bay where the people line up to fling themselves into the chill blue
She remembers having done something that made light. She remembers having even made song. She remembers having opened a door. She remembers that she is as good as the world let her be. She remembers that she is better, better than permission. She remembers she is yet to die. She remembers that she is blazing howling brilliant gift who wants others to cherish their own. She remembers she is note in chorus, green plant, blood root. She is ginger walking. She is gold of spice. She is voice that cries out. She is dance.
No longer seeking employment. She is not death until she dies and then after a moment she is something else.
Loss and Lottery
There’s shadow in this bag, The bag’s a sad curtain around it.
It hangs from my arm It cannot be put down
It rose up called to me in a desert town and what I thought it was a bearer of groceries, of the change purse, smoke to line my eyes
was only a way to cross until there was no more ground beneath it
Earth above, shadow-filled still it hangs from my arm. Walking forward is difficult.
That bagI bought that bag with scrubbing money. I lifted it out of that faint smell they always spray in the charity shops.
Three dollars and it swayed from the hook by the open window like a journey to Morocco. It smelled like petrol in that sun.
When I walked it scraped the dry riverbed that sudden rushed, full up A royal tapestry that bag became I hung it up at the door, a curtain. Behind it I slept good.
ANYA ACHTENBERG is an award-winning fiction writer and poet whose publications include the novel Blue Earth; novella The Stories of Devil-Girl; poetry collections The Stone of Language and, I Know What the Small Girl Knew. Individual pieces are published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Tupelo Quarterly; Beltway Poetry Quarterly; Harvard Review and Poet Lore. Writing awards and distinctions have come from Southern Poetry Review; Another Chicago Magazine; Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story; New Letters; the Raymond Carver Story Contest; the Minnesota State Arts Board, and others. Close to completion: her novel History Artist, with an ensemble cast of characters centered around a young Cambodian woman born at the moment the U.S. invasion began; and a poetry collection, Matadors at the Crossing. Her occasional blog Writing in Upheaval explores Anya’s organic approach to writing craft that expands creativity; counters historical amnesia; and examines how trauma and narration connect, and how history sits in us. Anya teaches two series of fiction, memoir, and multi-genre creative writing courses, Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World; and, The Disobedient Writer Workshops; and consults with writers individually. See https://anya-achtenberg.com/