The nineties
Some of us long for the hypocrisy again. — Arundhati Roy
We gathered in mall atriums, smudged our gum under benches. Around us, our leaders unleashed markets yearning to breathe free. I skulked outside the candle store. I wanted a boyfriend with long, straight hair like a girl, wanted punk rock and to be called feminist, not Dr. Hill’s testimony mocked by macho senators, but three chords and copyshop zines. Our history books
ended at D-Day and we made up the rest, mourned animals whose stuffed replicas cluttered our bedrooms. Some believed in the necessity of a planet, others practiced easy detachment. Our problems were one-note, easily reckoned, the poetry of CFCs and acid rain and the opaque beige skyline of L.A. We caught national abuses on video, like granular tape of police baton-beating a Black man
prone on the ground, evidence I saw and didn’t see every day. On Wall Street, extremists blasted a hole at the base of our tallest shrines, smoke twisted skyward and the tag “radical Islamic terrorists” wormed into our minds like advertising. Oh, we’d hear it again. By pen stroke our nation joined the largest free market in the world. We couldn’t see sweatshops, didn’t even try, as retail spaces filled
with bright, cheap objects. Untraveled outside our great white middle, I was impressed by unlimited salad and breadsticks. I babysat kids who raised leaden soldiers to their mouths, as our parents attended their last union meetings. At the doctor, insurance paid. Good teeth, good shoes, good psych drugs, the last mild summer before wildfire. We watched as cynics stripped the welfare state, like pulling down
the walls of someone else’s house to rip out the fixtures as they tried to live inside. I spent my grandma’s social security on compact discs and retro housewife dresses, I ate burritos and mini microwave bagels decorated to look like pizzas. No one asked more from me, yet I was dissatisfied. To live then was like hitting a drug, all consequences saved for another day. On the prairie
a veteran blew a federal building wide open, children inside. The paper printed the word ‘penis’ for the first time, and we gawped at Lorena and Tonya, aired the O.J. verdict in French class. Clerks shot up mailrooms, workplace shootings morphed into teenaged boys decked out with semiautomatics, the trench-coat myth easier to buy than the thrall of guns on tap. The dot-com
bubble became the housing bubble turned to this festering boil we live inside but haven’t named. Like some others, I had a modem that screamed into the night. In chat rooms, I told strangers my intimate personal details, spoke deeply about my core beliefs, and that benign audience, both transparently decent and brand new at this, put the data to no use. The Internet that would change
our human synapses had awakened, but this wasn’t its ascendency. Not yet, as we persisted in trading real goods, real services, real dollars. I knew how much cash I carried. The court convicted one doctor for euthanizing the ill while others delivered patients to amber-bottle narcotic death. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted to learn about Marxism at a college to bankrupt my parents. Across the world,
future autocrats scrounged blood lucre melted off colonial skeletons, flattered over caviar, dug in their heels. Always rubles and riyals to be made, always another dollar. Imagine how confident we felt in our unquestioned virtue, how we shied from the webcam, our future closer than it appeared. We hugged our own hollow surfaces. We would never be this perfect again.
The power of passive voice
On a news loop, the FBI director crossed the Blue Room, his face arranged in a recursive “oh shit” expression, like my questions of what to do, how to act,
now that this man is president. I know my own grandiosity, I am no patriot, and on that day, I drank house merlot, unemployed Florida parent drowning in
terrifying but common quicksand. Even as the Watergate lawyers cited, again, a new and historic end to precedent, that afternoon, the security-cleared translator
called Reality Winner had already left work at the Whitelaw Building in Augusta, report on Russian election interference stuffed in her tights. Or should I say
the file was printed and was removed from a facility, was sent to a journalist, a chimera appearing by invisible hand before us, because who was Reality Winner
but our collective, passive-voiced American conscience, too naive not to breadcrumb her own espionage conviction? The passive can be a change agent that obscures
responsibility, might even enable action, but we know how it’s used in this country, because Reality Winner is in prison and everyone else in this story walks free. I suspect
she wanted what I had, a version of family, my anonymous face frozen in the TV strobe, all my Lean Cuisines and breastfeeds and job applications. Where each day is an
exercise in additive futility, concealed by believing so hard in it. At her arrest, CNN used an aerial of the federal building where our offhand mole once worked, all
fluid lines, walkways paved into a series of curves. The planners might’ve pictured ocean waves, a current in which to lose ourselves, day after day of the relentless
neutrality of water as it slips through so many fingers, strong-armed double H joined to a single culpable O shaped like a needle’s eye.
What use are you?
In our final poetry class my student says his parents who pay for his education are making him change his major, that what I teach is of no use, and waits for my protest. I am not the person to ask. My god is so small, he fits inside a Scantron sheet. Each bubble opens like his mouth to wail an ancient lament. Actually, he is quiet.
According to a middle school test, I should work in Administration. Instead I am a teacher in a school with few resources. We took the test in the orchestra room, among the ductwork and violins, upright basses draped with dustcloths. We had to carry our heavy instruments to school and we did not complain. We were in the art wing, falling down, holes in the wall where we crammed Wendy’s wrappers until the borders of the room fell in.
Projections will say we all need nurses and HVAC techs and actuaries but I was told by my parents not to do those things and so today I am quiet. I won’t tell my student about the law school where I almost but didn’t go because no one I knew who went got an actual lawyering job. This is a pyramid scheme and for it to work you’ve got to find out too late. Some of my friends got Hospitality. Some got Human Services. The best got doctoral degrees we learned to regret. The worst understood early what “con man” is short for.
My student says he’s switching to Psych and when I ask why, he looks despondent. My god is so large he shakes the earth in that imperceptible way that is simply the earth moving. Ice melting. Our heart-calving when the Provost talks about cutting any program that will not sustain itself. The Provost is a kind man but it is too late. We are finding out what the verb means, to use, and about the edges on the noun, use, its humble slide into the question with our bodies at the end.
Erin Hoover is the author of Barnburner, winner of Elixir Press’s Antivenom Poetry Award and a Florida Book Award in poetry. Her next collection, No Spare People, is forthcoming in October 2023 from Black Lawrence Press. She lives in rural Tennessee and works as an assistant professor of English at Tennessee Tech. Fun fact: her poem “On the Origin of Species,” which appeared in Gargoyle #61, was also selected for the 2013 edition of Best New Poets.