Fall 2010

Congratulations to Shelley Minden and Raphaela Weissman! Their pieces made us laugh and cringe and, of course, do the "poetry sigh." We're grateful to share them with you.

Rescued by Shelley Minden
Eugene by Raphaela Weissman

Shelley wrote "Rescued" in a class on found poetry taught by JT Stewart. The poem is based on an article from All Animals, the magazine of the US Humane Society.

Rescued

From the California yard
barbed wire imprisoning
the circle of scorched grass
the two round bowls: one grain, one water
eyeing the sky.

Of humankind, some tell,
wise thoughts alone
might make
a heaven of hell.

But a hippo
even a pygmy hippo
needs what it needs:
needs water
trickling down rocks
needs brush
throbbing with bird wings
needs mud holes:
sacred as prayer.
 
Today she lumbers
from the wide pool of water
to the pond of mud
sinks until just two nostrils meet the sky.

Heaven is surely mud
on legs on stomach on chin
caressing
transforming
connecting to an ancient dream
that dream of hippo forebears, large and small
a dream so still
so gentle
so merciful
it soothes the world.

Raphaela Weissman's piece came out of a prompt in David Schmader's "Brainstorming" class. The class was asked to write about a time when they had hurt someone. David asked the class to use brainstorming to work through several versions of a piece until the heart of the story was reached, or, as he put it, "The details that sing." Raphaela is grateful to have this method under her belt; it's especially helpful for a piece like this, since she had several pages' worth of material on the horror show that was her dating life.

Eugene

Max and I shared a drink, an ice cream, a movie and two romantic walks before he told me that I had the wrong idea—back in Germany, there was another woman. T.J. got my number at a party over some winking charming line and called me every night for four months before he let me know that he’d never considered me more than a friend. Sean came to visit just long enough to tell me I looked amazing and take it back the next day when I tried to kiss him. Josh spent the night, then told me over breakfast that it was a mistake and left.

With each successive failure, there was a friend present to assure me that it didn’t matter how this happened; the problem was not with me, but with the dude. “He’s an asshole,” they’d say, holding my knee as tears ran into my nose, snot into my mouth, then follow it up with a string of other possible diagnoses: Douchebag. Crazy. Egomaniacal. Brainless. Sadistic. Oblivious to the laws of physics and human relations. A peach pit where their heart should be.

I don’t recall thinking, as I cried and half-listened and appreciated the comfort but didn’t believe a word of it, that someday, perhaps I, too, could have a peach pit for a heart, that I could reduce someone else to this state, for once. But when the opportunity presented itself, there was no question that this was my shining hour, and I had no choice but to fulfill my sweet destiny.

Enter Eugene. He was a guy I met on the Internet. So really, he wasn’t a person. That thought grew in my mind until it found a comfortable home there, right alongside all my most solidly held political opinions and moral beliefs, as I watched the clock next to my bed march forward past the time when I was supposed to have met poor Eugene for lunch at Veselka’s, a half hour subway ride away from my apartment. I wasn’t standing up a person. I was standing up a ghost. A profile picture.

Poor Eugene. It wasn’t his fault he fell on the wrong end of several years of dating dysfunction, just like it probably wasn’t Max’s or T.J.’s or Sean’s fault that they got a little sloppy with their common decency with a woman who was constantly one douchebag away from a meltdown.

“Fuck ’im,” I thought as I shut off my alarm clock and pulled the covers over my head. “He probably deserves it, anyway.”

If the two-minute phone conversation I’d had with Eugene a week earlier was any indication (the conversation in which, for no good reason, I postponed the date I was currently blowing off), he definitely did not deserve this. “Great!” he’d said. “I mean, that’s fine. No problem at all.” There was a sad eagerness in his voice that made me cringe; it was achingly familiar, for one thing, and it was something I had no desire to have reflected back at me.

Perhaps, like me, Eugene had crawled to OkCupid in a desperate hour. Perhaps he, too, had had enough of being single in New York, where, thanks to a wildly overrated franchise which featured four women running around the city bumping into randy delivery men who look like Johnny Depp and discussing it over midday cocktails in Manhattan which everyone can somehow magically afford, dating was being marketed as a fun thing to do. “Just get out there!” ordered the headline of Time Out New York’s annual dating issue.

“Why?” I demanded of my friend Dan, nestled happily in a relationship with a beautiful girl, safe in the realm of eye-rolling couples who spend their time sneering at their sad single friends. “Why do I have to get out there? Who says?”

“Do you like being single?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but I also don’t like giving up two perfectly good hours of my day to sit across from someone I’ve never met and pretend to be interested in everything they say and wear clothes I don’t usually wear and not say anything that might accidentally reveal anything honest about myself.”

He shrugged. “Well,” he said, “those are kind of your only options.”

I reminded myself that Internet dating was less of a punchline than it had been in its infancy, and that, after all, my parents had met through a personals ad my mother placed in the Village Voice. It was 1984, and, she lamented in her ad, the world she’d cherished in the sixties seemed to have gone to shit; all that love and possibility and LSD had been replaced by greed and exercise videos and Ronald Reagan. Was there anyone else out there who was sick of it all, who wished we could stop obsessing about our bodies and our money for two minutes and connect over meaningful things like music and sex and war? My father found the ad and responded, essentially, “That’d be me.” They met at Café Figaro in the West Village and however many months later, they were married. At the time of my dating crisis, the story was a small consolation to me since they were twenty-two years into a Cold War of a marriage that was no one’s idea of a happy ending; but at the end of the day, if my mother hadn’t decided, in a moment of New York loneliness, to “Just Get Out There!”, I would not have been born.  

So I gave in: poured all my wit into an OkCupid profile, responded to any message that wasn’t overtly inane or offensive and went on a couple dates. I met Ryan, who, a few minutes into the rendezvous, had already outlined for me why my plans for the future were a terrible idea— “That’s interesting, I had a friend who did AmeriCorps. She hated it. Came home crying every day and had to move back home with her parents. But, you know, good luck.” I met Matt, who rolled his eyes when I interrupted his twenty-minute dissertation on the differences between Star Trek and Star Wars to ask him where he was from. “Why are you asking so many questions?” he said, clearly irritated by my shoddy social skills.

And I met a few Eugenes: nice dudes. Nice and polite. Polite and nice. I don’t remember any of them; their faces are like blurry thumbprints, their voices the dull drone of Charlie Brown adults— “I took the R to get here. Do you take that train often? Sometimes it takes forever.” In their emails, they were witty, self-deprecating and sweet. They were the embodiments of the personalities I’d imagined for the guy sitting across the aisle from me in the movie theater, the only other person seeing a Turkish movie by himself on a Friday night.    

At the risk of dipping into uplifting territory, because to paint an accurate picture of my dating life this story should be depressing at best, I did eventually find a nice dude who also manages to possess more life than a lukewarm bowl of Campbell’s soup. He was what I was looking for during my solitary trips to art galleries and readings: a lanky, softspoken fellow traveler, like the protagonist of some introspective graphic novel, who, like his female counterpart, came upon true love after having been kicked to the curb by so many heartless bitches who’ve never gone to a movie alone. I found him in Seattle, and, as the annoyingly true expression goes, when I least expected it— I wonder if such a story is even possible in New York.

Maybe that’s what I should have been blaming for my prior dating misadventures: not the men themselves, but the city where I found them. Maybe it was an inevitable side effect of living there long enough; a sort of perverted version of paying it forward where we thrust forth the douchebaggery we have been dealt upon the next unsuspecting victim, until he is forced, in turn, to douchebag unto another. I can’t say that I felt a tangible evil overtake me as I slept in that morning, but I do know that, rather than picture Eugene standing outside of Veselka’s, checking the time and watching the coupled off world pass him by, I thought, “Good riddance, asshole,” and smiled as I closed my eyes.