"More Enlightenment Ideas" by Carolie Parker

October 06, 2022 in Relish: An internet Archive

More Enlightenment Ideas

I like a fine incision,
a field of moving rain,

flat black thunder

considering the body
is hard to inhabit,
considering (coldly)
the faculty of reason favors
whip, leash, collar,
and we don’t know
what’s down there

a soul, or
just more animal
than I care to handle.

ξ

“More Enlightenment Ideas" was first published in Denver Quarterly.

Carolie Parker is a visual artist and writer with a background in foreign languages and art history. She was recently a MacDowell Fellow and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly and River Styx. What Books Press published Mirage Industry, a book-length collection of her poetry, in 2016. In 2019, the Fellows of Contemporary Art selected her for a Curator’s Lab Award, which funded an exhibition focusing on the relationship between language and visual image. She has exhibited her visual work widely in Los Angeles (images on Instagram @carolieparker). She holds a BFA in studio art from UC Irvine and an MA in comparative literature from UCLA (Latin American, US and French poetry).

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"The Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness" by Jennifer Martelli

October 01, 2022 in Relish: An internet Archive

The Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness

Every embryo curls like a cashew nut.
Every cashew nut hangs from its red strange apple,
drops from its drupe with the thin-lipped

leering look of a devil.
Every devil, like the cashew, has smooth skin
like an old man’s chinos. An old man hunches

over a cart in the Stop & Shop
looking for yesterday’s Sara Lee
all by himself because his wife is dead or

confused. The wife
curls into herself, her back curved, her hands
curved, too, into her breast bone. She’s small now,

a newborn, translucent and apart. The skin
of every cashew is toxic. When roasted the smoke
burns the pink lung layers right off —

sometimes I think: when I pull all sadness from my sternum
it will be a cut-glass bowl I’ll put out for company.

ξ

“The Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness" was first published in The Sycamore Review.

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.

"Autumn Swim" by Merri Andrew

August 15, 2022 in Relish: An internet Archive

Autumn Swim

Sight doubly dimmed
I pull along the
glowing green lanes
in twilight and
darkened goggles

Every second breath
gives me orange streetlights
through the casuarinas

Backstroke.
An orange light pulses
on the underside of a plane
like the plane’s slow heart
or a diagram of where
the heart should be
passing

ξ

"Autumn Swim" was first published in Block 8, a now-defunct literary journal.

Merri Andrew writes poetry and short fiction, some of which is published in Strange Horizons, Five On The Fifth, Cordite, and Baby Teeth. She lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country in Canberra, Australia, where she also works in health promotion, bakes sweet things, and coaches junior soccer. Merri can be found on Twitter @MerriAndrewHere

"Godsend" by Mary Peelen

July 30, 2022 in Relish: An internet Archive

Godsend

            On top of the water, the sky rippled thinly. Lake Macatawa was clear and cold that fall. My paddle cut through the surface, carving circles that spread outward, overlapping as they went. Eddies swirled and collapsed before the water was made calm again. Symmetry revealed itself so persistently back in Michigan, I felt certain it was a reflection of heaven as well.
            Father’s old canoe was still in Veenstra’s boathouse, sticky with cobwebs and pine needles, but perfectly sound. I had no trouble putting it in the lake. Back when I was a girl, Father used to take me fishing at an hour when mist hovered over the water. I still remember the excitement, the tug, the slick wet thrill of a fish on the line. My earliest memory is of Father at home, his face floating above my bed in the dark when I was just an infant. The side of my crib was held by a tricky, rickety metal latch. Mother had the knack of it, but when Father came for me in the night, he shook and rattled the bedrail with a most violent conviction. Calamity itself woke me into this harsh world.
            The new minister was a godsend. He spoke like a learned man. I’d never heard such theology, no one at church had. We said God the normal way, with a vowel sound like baa. Reverend Hoekstra pronounced God with the sound of awe in the center, all reverent and drawn out like that. I tried not to smile when he preached. I’m so toothy I can hardly stretch my lips all the way around my face.
            The Reverend lifted the whole congregation from our mourning stupor after Father’s passing. He was tall, even for a Dutchman, and so handsome it would’ve been improper to be around him, were he not the minister and all. He had blue eyes and a dimple in his chin, exactly like Paul Newman. We didn’t keep gossip magazines at home, but all the ladies from church pored over his picture at the beauty parlor on Saturday afternoons.
            No one had ever noticed me before. I was shortsighted and thick around the middle. My hands were an embarrassment, all red and torn. I wore gloves to church on Sunday, of course. Saturday mornings, Mother and I still scrubbed the church floors, the aisles and the vestibule. We couldn’t expect his wife to do it.
            Our lawn was square and tidy as any yard in town. We hung our bleached bedsheets on the clothesline out back every Tuesday. Dark wash was on Wednesdays. The cemetery next to the plant was just as neat, though more solemn. Mother and I clipped the grass and deadheaded the geraniums on Father’s grave on Sunday afternoons.
            Reverend put a hunger inside me that nothing could touch. I’d been ravenous for weeks. On my way to work in the morning, I went to the IGA and bought vanilla wafers, a Hershey bar, some beef jerky, and a package of windmill cookies. On my way home in the afternoon, I stopped at the bakery. Donuts were half price after four. Mother liked them, too.
            The minister’s wife was from a good family, Grand Rapids money. Furniture people. She wore pastel colored suits and sat in the front pew. She was trim and pretty with tiny, square white teeth.
            When he smiled, his eyes lit up like a miracle. They shone more darkly in anger. Once I saw them go a deep violet hue, and from the pulpit, when he warned of God’s wrath, they flashed so mightily, I believe they saw everything, all my unworthiness.
            I worked at General Electric out on East 16th. It was steady, and they were nice to me. I had my very own desk off the shop floor and all the paper and pencils I could use. Our plant made motors for refrigerators. Engineers upstairs did the electrical designs, but someone had to do the math, long division and logarithms, mostly. Father taught me algebra when I was still in grade school, and I was pretty handy with a slide rule. I did my sums on blocks of manila paper, then copied thin columns of numbers into hand-sewn books with shiny green covers. I went full-time after finishing the eleventh grade. Mother and I needed the extra money once Father was gone.
            Sometimes I was overwhelmed with the profusion of God’s detail, the sheer recklessness of it. I’d never seen such hands, for example. Reverend’s palms were narrow and concave, capable in the air as angel wings, and just as graceful. With the tiniest gesture, he put new life into a tired old parable we’d all heard a thousand times, and when he raised his arms above his head, drawing Jesus down into the sanctuary, there was perfect stillness in the pews.
            I watched the sinews at his wrists, fine and taut as puppet strings. They contracted when he held my head between his hands. I closed my eyes, and they covered my cheeks, my neck, my chest. His robe was deep and dark as gravity itself, and I fell in to the center of him, and when he reached inside and tore my secrets open, I believe something holy passed between us. For days afterwards, it burned between my legs, memory of his hands like a hot flight of spirit.
            I understood the facts of biology, of course. It wasn’t ignorance, but something more complicated that pressed in on me, a weight like the heavy summer heat, its smell of cut grass, chemical and vaguely anesthetic, wafting up from the square green lawns.
            It smelled like iron, exactly like the water in Lake Newaygo with its taste of rusty nails. I might’ve been horrified by all the blood, the shocking color of it, more orange than red. It came in a profusion, clumps so sinewy I was afraid the mess would clog the plumbing. Instead, I was thrilled and I wept, buoyed with relief. I’d been overfull of tears and a painful kind of longing, the sort of shame I sometimes relieved with a hot water bottle and secret caresses in our dark four poster bed. If I waited until Mother’s snore was regular and rhythmic, I could feel myself quite alone with it.
            Deep inside the gory mess, a veiny mass with two clouded eyeballs, gray and unblinking. Bloody as fish entrails.
            The wax paper in the vanilla wafers box was sturdy, so I folded it into a tiny envelope making sharp white creases with the edge of my fingernail. Then, down on my knees, I cupped my hands around the meaty, red soul of it. Mostly, it slipped back into the toilet water. I saved what I could. I folded the packet, then I put it inside the cookie box and tucked it in my pocketbook. Burying the thing was out of the question. No place to dig a hole without an explanation.
            Lake perch swam under the canoe in parallel formation. I wondered how they managed such precision. I envied their fishy vector fields, the Lord’s call to order so plainly manifest in the world. Theirs was a more intuitive kind of math, perhaps, watery and biological.
            I lowered the tiny packet over the gunwale and let it slip into the lake. It slid away smoothly without a sound or a splash, not even the smallest ripple. I had feared the wax paper would float, but thankfully, it sank straight down.
            A far flight of seagulls skimmed the lake. One bird fell away and dived down into the water for food, perhaps, or sport, then all together, the flock lifted again, pulsing wings driving them upward and away. I watched till they disappeared, following their ascent toward the sun setting out over the Great Lake, the great, reddening hell of it, and for a moment, I was blinded by its exquisitely round circumference.

ξ

"Godsend" was first published in Gulf Coast.

Mary Peelen is is the author of QUANTUM HERESIES, winner of the Kithara Book Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and Paris.

"My Body is Wrong" by Olivia Muenz

June 01, 2022 in Relish: An internet Archive

My Body is Wrong

Every race starts the same. The gun goes off and I’m terrified. I’m a cannonball let loose. My legs move on their own. Elbows tucked, knees pointed straight, I’m the embodiment of efficiency. Every motion is critical and confident. I must make it to the front of the pack. I will make it to the front of the pack. I could bulldoze a house with my thighs. I could run straight into the sun.

•

I stopped running in the same way I began: all at once and without much thought. It was August of 2009 and I was done with it. I didn’t deliberate. I deferred to my body for once. I didn’t tell anyone. No coaches, no teammates. I just never went back to practice. I was tired.

I had just returned home to New York from Oxford, where I lived for the first half of the summer, which changed me in a way you can only be changed at seventeen. I studied art on its own the first time. No AP classes. No learning for grades. I learned without effort. I got to be a kid. No five-hour practices. No cross-training. No waking up at 5am. No squeezing in homework.

I went to Stonehenge and admired its permanence and staticity and confused existence. I went to Brighton Beach and threw sand pebbles into the ocean one by one and the tide regurgitated them to me one by one by one. And the pointlessness of cyclicality didn’t matter, cellphone-less beside the wharf with all my friends.

But every so often, I would remember that I was falling behind. Back in New York, my teammates were training all summer ahead of our cross-country season. Five times a week, they would wake up before the sun to meet our coach at the high school. No other sports teams practiced. In the lonely world of pre-professional athleticism, it was just them and the hot sun and the empty school.

Our other classmates never came to our races, but we were on the best team in the school. We qualified for State. We ran in the Federation Championship. Our team captain went to Nationals every year. We trained with Olympic seriousness.

And suddenly it all felt so silly, so self-serious. We were seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen. We were only kids. But we weren’t really. We were something in between. Not a girl, not yet a woman just like Britney Spears. Like popcorn, every few weeks someone in our region would pop up out of nowhere, suddenly fast, suddenly winning, suddenly nationally ranked, suddenly a woman. And we all secretly hoped that that potential was also marinating in us, waiting for some arbitrary moment to reveal itself.

•

I go to the doctor because my body is wrong. I haven’t had my period in five months. My pediatrician wants to put me on birth control. I am confused by the proposition. I don’t understand why I should use a pill that prevents pregnancy to get my period. She doesn’t mention the possible side effects, the headaches, the mood changes. I decide to let my body sort itself out. No one suggests that I should stop running so much.

When I return the next year with blood in my urine, we find my first rare disease whose vascular implications mean that birth control could kill me. I take in the moment for posterity. I arrange a small vow to my body: I will always trust you over anyone else.

•

I focus on a point far in the distance even with my line of vision. Never looking up, never looking down, it keeps me moving fast. No objects matter except the sixty girls running beside me, made of mostly limbs, knees and elbows. I want to murder everyone in my way. I threaten to destroy everything they’ve ever loved. And in the moment, that feels normal.

•

To say something like The world is designed by and for men doesn’t mean much of anything. It is too abstract to generate feeling. I first notice trickle down patriarchy when my life depends on it. To spend ten years and $30,000 searching for a diagnosis for vague but widespread pain should be a sign of some failure, but there is no one big enough to blame except my government, which lacks a face to wag my finger at. There are little failures everywhere and they all attach in some great invisible web. I pay attention to the way each failure relates to others as my only line of defense. An egoic doctor ignoring my pain is my incompetent supervisor. A lack of funding from the NIH for research for illnesses that predominantly affect women is my dismissive coach when I miss my period for months. They all band together to tell me about my body or ignore it altogether.

•

I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. The nurse takes my height and weight, blood pressure and pulse. The nurse plugs my numbers into an electronic file that represents my body. An algorithm calculates my body mass index. My body is a point far outside the bell curve, lost at sea. The doctor tells me you are too thin. The doctor thinks he’s throwing me a life raft. He is my first adult doctor. I think about my pediatrician. I miss her waiting room with big illustrations of polar bears. I miss being asked questions. I’m not sure what to say. I am a small little girl. He is a big man in loafers. He is wrong, but I say nothing. I defer through silence. He does not mention that my blood pressure is low.

•

After the first four hundred meters, I’m settled into my position. I am in the woods. Only my heavy breath and light stride punctuate the quiet. I can’t see anything but the trail. The leaves precariously hanging onto branches don’t register. All I see is the stretch of distance and the bumps of the trail, every tree root and pebble accounted for and avoided.

•

Sara was a popcorn girl. More than just my team’s captain, she was unbeatable in my region. She won every race by minutes, lived a few meters ahead of everyone else, ran every race against herself. She was nationally ranked. She was going to the Olympics one day. She had entered a new stratum of runners, and like all pre-professional female athletes, she was destined for one of two things: she would become a professional runner, or her body would fail by her early twenties.

We trained around Sara’s needs. We overtrained. Often our all male coaching staff trained us with the boys, made us fit to meet the boys’ schedule, fit into the timeframe of boys’ biological development. Like clockwork, I would become too injured to run by the end of each season. I limped around my high school between classes clutching different parts of my body: in November my knee, in March my lower back, in May my hips, in June my dizzy head.

•

I go to the doctor because my head is wrong. To prevent my migraines, they give me medications made for other illnesses: SSRIs meant for depression, beta blockers meant for blood pressure, Botox meant for wrinkles originally meant for crossed eyes, anticonvulsants meant to prevent seizures. Because they’re not meant for head pain, they do more than prevent migraines. They have unendurable side effects: I hear voices, my hair falls out.

Migraines have been around since ancient Egypt, recorded by Hippocrates in 400 B.C. The first migraine medicine created specifically for migraine prevention started trials in 2017 A.D. If migraines didn’t disproportionately affect women, it wouldn’t have taken 2,000 years to develop a treatment. I eagerly wait a year for my medicine to enter the market like it’s a husband returning home for dinner.

When I begin my new migraine medicine, it controls my menstrual cycle. On the side of my prescription, it reads: side effects may include constipation or soreness at the injection site. There’s no mention of hormone interference. Because medical research routinely excludes women, we don’t know how illness is particular to us, how medicine particularly affects us. The cyclicality of our hormones is ignored for the staticity of maleness. I report my side effect to the FDA with hundreds of other women, but the label stays the same.

•

I get to the hill and want to stop. But my legs are moving on their own and they don’t stop. They could go on forever. I am alone with my legs in the woods. No cheering. I cheer for myself, go go go. I raise my arms up a little and pump them back farther and farther with each stride. They are Newton’s cradle. I don’t slow down.

•

Between The Real World episodes on MTV, I watch a Dove commercial on Real Beauty. They tell me to create a new standard of beauty. They tell me to have confidence through bar soap. By high school, Olay commands me: love the skin you’re in.

In the early days of Facebook, memes circulate slowly. Overlaid on a picture of a full-figured Marilyn Monroe reads this is what a real woman looks like. Boys in my class share the image over and over. Models are ridiculed for being rail thin. Eat a cheeseburger!someone comments. This is not what a real woman looks like. I am not a real woman.

I grow up thinking body image campaigns aren’t for people like me. Are all in service to the male gaze. Are only there to give women confidence. And then I got sick.

•

I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I sit unclothed on a table in the middle of a big room. A boy my age looks into my ears and asks me questions. He makes awkward comments about ear wax. The words come out of his mouth in flutters as he avoids looking at my breasts. I want to pat his head and offer him a cigarette. I am a professional. His hand shakes as he presses his stethoscope to my bare back and I imagine him in ten years, post med school, post residency, post awkward patient interactions, post caring, post humility.

The real doctor enters the room and asks if I have an eating disorder. No introductions. No ice breakers. I miss the boy’s tentative hands and questions. I want to laugh at the doctor. I want to ask him if he thinks that question would work, if anyone with an eating disorder would just come out and say so when asked. But I answer no in that careful tone I’ve perfected, respectful and believable. I try to ask a question about my symptoms. What did you eat for breakfast this morning? The words fall out of his mouth all pointy. The fluorescent light hanging above me changes shape. The room is an interrogation and I am a criminal. Coconut yogurt and granola. Every question he asks is a little trick. What’s your favorite food? How many meals do you eat a day? I can hardly tell what he’s up to. I want to pat him on the head for being a good little detective, but I still need him to answer my medical questions. I check the clock on the wall and time is running out. My fifteen minutes are almost up. I was born like this, in this ratio. I speak in the language of algorithms. But none of that matters now. I live too far outside the curve and he wants is to pull me back in. I leave the appointment the same way I came in, feeling wrong wrong wrong.

•

You’re built like a runner. This is what everyone tells me when they meet me. They are free to talk about my body because I am thin and tall and that means I am good. When my mom asks me to show off my thin legs to her friends, I roll my pants up to my knees and walk around the room so they can laugh at the physics of my body. In the sixth grade, my classmate accuses me of having an eating disorder. During races, spectators can’t believe my legs can hold me up. They let me know that as I cross the finish line. You are too thin. My best friend on the team won’t talk to me every time I eat pizza because it’s not fair that I can eat pizza and be thin. I find out that she’s not kidding, that it really does make her mad.

•

When I am my most depressed and teenaged, I can’t eat for four months. I weigh only 97 pounds. My friends envy my thinness. They talk about my body because I am thin and that means I am good. After my boyfriend breaks up with me, I feel unattractive. When he sleeps with other women, I am quick to insult their weight because it’s the only ammunition I’ve got. I’m embarrassed by this but can’t seem to stop.

•

I make it to the top. I am stronger than anyone, stronger than Sylvester Stallone, stronger than Arnold Schwarzennager. I go back down the hill I just came up. I don’t think about pointlessness. I do not make this a metaphor. The world is literal and before me. The world wants my soft step. My hair is falling foliage. I plod my agile tree limbs into the dirt. I lower my branches and lean into it. The gravity of the world makes me move faster and faster. I let it happen. I remember where the earth curves to get my footing right, to avoid the tree root, to maximize speed without falling. I am going so fast.

•

I remember the smell of chlorine and the all-male coaching staff surrounding me and Sara and our five other varsity teammates in our high school’s pool during our lunch period as we cross-trained instead of eating. I remember running ten miles with the boys in single digit temperature in January and the feeling of hot incinerating my lungs as I walked back inside my high school’s gym to ride stationary bikes for an hour followed by an hour-long core workout. I remember feeling like my muscle was eating itself. I remember missing my period for four months. I remember the early symptoms of my disability that I ignored to keep running. I remember being injured more than anyone. I remember injury being normal, expected. And by the end of each season, when my body was too tired to move fast anymore, I remember watching the back of Sara’s head growing smaller and smaller ahead of me like she was getting sucked straight into the sun. I had never seen someone that could really go on forever.

Sometimes when I’m bedridden I pretend I can go on forever. I think of the weightlessness of my body running up four flights of stairs and the evenness of my breath. I think of feeling completely in control of every molecule inside of me. For a moment I feel light as a feather. I feel immortal, invincible. I am a cannonball again.

•

I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because my body feels wrong. I go to the doctor because I am wrong. I go to the doctor because I am wrong. I go to the doctor because I am wrong. I go to the doctor because I am wrong. I go to the doctor because I am wrong. I go to the doctor because I am wrong. I go to the doctor. I am wrong. I go to the doctor. I am wrong. I go to the doctor. I am wrong. I go to the doctor. I am wrong. I am wrong. I am wrong.

•

I leave the woods and can see people yelling in the distance. Their voices don’t register. Their cheering arms move in sync with the tree branches bending to the wind. I hear the ocean in my seashell ears. For the last 2200 meters, I’ve been telling myself only 800 meters left. But this time it’s real. I can see the next person in front of me. I threaten everything she’s ever loved. I must beat her. I catch up to her. For a small moment we are conjoined twins. Our arms move together, our legs move together, our heart beats as one. She speeds up and we are two again. I sprint ahead of her to prove something. She can’t catch up. I keep sprinting. I can’t stop. I am proving something to the wind. I use every bit of energy left in my pathetic, wheezing mitochondria.

•

In a Facebook support group for my genetic illness, a woman writes: I’m so mad. I went to see a new rheumatologist and my doctor just told me to lose fifteen pounds and all my symptoms would go away. He wouldn’t even run any tests. I click open the post’s 54 comments to see woman after woman after woman say same same same. We have joined ourselves together virtually out of desperation. We crowdsource the data of our bodies to make sense of ourselves. We talk to each other when our doctors don’t listen. We solve each other’s pain.

I remember the nephrologist’s office with plaque after plaque of New York’s Top Doctor Awards hung on a wall behind a doctor that prescribed going home and eating ice cream for blood in my urine. If you gain fifteen pounds, you won’t pee blood anymore. I said nothing. I was a little girl. He was a big man in loafers. I looked at my chart on the clipboard in his hands: the low BMI circled, the check mark next to dairy allergy ignored.

I am the 55th woman to comment on the post: same except I was told to gain fifteen pounds. It’s almost like we can never be the right size.

•

I go to the doctor, a rheumatologist, a woman. She asks me questions. She types into her computer all of my answers. She doesn’t ask about my weight. She bends me up and down. She squeezes my heels. She diagnoses me.

She leaves the room. I laugh uncontrollably. I don’t know why. I watch myself laugh at the cotton balls in a jar. At the white room. At my purple gown. I finally have a name. A defense. A retort.

She returns to the room and orders me scan after scan. She apologizes that it’s taken me ten years to learn why my body is. I leave the room and I feel light as a feather. I am a cannonball let loose. I have solved something important despite every little failure. I want to wag my finger at something that will see me.

•

I stop running in the same way I begin: all at once and without much thought. I cross the finish line. My limbs flail. I hardly have any bones. My heart and lungs think I’m still running. I rip off my number and hand it to another hand who hands me a medal. There are noises, all logically singular: the cheers from the crowds coming out of individual mouths, the feet barreling down behind me, the clanking of medals and rips of paper. If I hadn’t been running, I could trace them all to their source. But for me, right now, they blend together into nothing. I only hear the thump of my heart in my ears and the soft erratic whir of my breath. I don’t know how or why but I walk down the shoot. I keep walking and walking and walking. My legs could go on forever.

ξ

"My Body is Wrong" was first published in Gulf Coast.

Olivia Muenz is the author of the chapbook Where Was I Again (Essay Press). She holds an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where she earned the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose and served as an editor for New Delta Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, Anomaly, Southeast Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Louisiana State University. Find her online at oliviamuenz.com