Health + Youth

i drank a lot. i lost my job.
i lived like nothing mattered.
then you stopped, and came across
my little bridge of fallen answers.
—Leonard Cohen

You like leafing through biographies
There you’re in another life
How strange, how startling
to turn up in the dark woods of another life
But you can leave at any moment
for the street or the park,
or at night from the balcony
you like to see the stars,
belonging to no one,
stars like knives that wound us
without a drop of blood
stars pure and shining
heartless

—Adam Zagajewski

“This happiness, or perhaps it shouldn’t be called happiness, joy, yes, perhaps that was the word, this joy was strange. Like the sensation of traveling in an extremely smooth, very comfortable train that had always been there in front of her but for some reason she had never been able to take, or even glimpse passing by, and she wondered how it was possible that she had never seen it before now. Riding along in her smooth transport, she got the feeling that it would be impossible to step down.”
—“Partners,” Pilar Fraile Amador

I would like to literally set some men on fire

crush the ashes into        a hideous jewel

& wear it on my neck taking compliments like

I hate this necklace but thanks

I would like to twist some men into          a beautiful balloon animal

I would like to feed some men to tigers

& put it on C-SPAN where no one                                 would watch

sometimes I would like to set myself on fire

the tiger can chase my ass while I play dumb like Why meeee

Bitch you know why says the tiger

Don’t hurry                   I’ll eat you when convenient

I climb a tree that’s white like anxiety

Alright tiger you can eat                                             one earlobe

or my elbows I don’t need those                                  take my toes

I hate them anyway

the tiger is quiet                                 Come down & we’ll talk

I suddenly remember that I am               so tired

that I’ve been in the tree for eighteen years

& my fingers                 feel like burning

—“Duende,” Fran Tirado

“A year ago, Jiayu’s mother had called to report the death of Yingying. Ovarian cancer, forty-three, her daughter just starting middle school. Jiayu could not see her childhood playmate as a woman in a coffin, a mother’s lost child, a child’s lost mother. But what difference did seeing make? Perhaps grief was nothing but disbelief.”
—“When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” Yiyun Li

Spanish feels like eating roses sprin-
   kled with lime; English, peeling
   potatoes, barefoot.

—“They Chopped Down the Tree I Used to Lie Under and Count Stars With,” Diana Maria Delgado

“Another film her husband had been writing about for his book was a French movie about people who simply came back. These returned people had died, funerals has been held in their names, and now they were appearing in the city center, clothed and in fine health. At first, they were divided by age and gender and temporarily housed in airplane hangars. Families had to provide papers and passports and photos to claim their undead. In this movie, there was no blood, no biting and lurching. The undead had the vestiges of their former memories; their body temperatures were five degrees lower; they pretended to sleep at night but they were faking; none of them actually slept. They all looked serene and terrified. A doctor theorized they were stuck in a latent period, still in the process of awakening into a new life, though in the end the doctor concluded this latent period would be unending. Meanwhile, the undead experienced an unspoken and collective realization of their own: suddenly they were driven to leave their families, to roam out into the countryside. They were drawn to underground places, down into the sewers and tunnels. In one scene, a man’s undead wife tried to climb a garden wall, in order to escape their home. The man ran out into the yard in his pajamas, his bare feet a luminescent white in the green grass. He shouted her name. She climbed faster. He grabbed hold of her ankle. When she turned to look at him, her expression suggested it was not her undead state that was so strange; rather, it was the state of the living—a state so starved and selfish it was willing to make her a prisoner, if that’s what it took to keep her close—that was the most deranged one of all.”
—Laura Van Den Berg, The Third Hotel

What rolls down the windowpane
Could it be heaven’s rain
Don’t you know it’s a shame
Love, I’m drowning

Been from feast to famine
and all points in between
but I’m good for the damage
when you cut me I bleed

What’s beyond the windowpane
Is it just heaven’s stain
Don’t you know it’s a shame
Now I’m rolling

Been from feast to famine
and Maine to Mexico
collecting the damage
gone straight through my soul

Been from feast to famine
and all points in between

Been from feast to famine
and Maine to Mexico
been collecting the damage
gone straight through my soul

What rolls down the windowpane
Could it be heaven’s rain
Don’t you know it’s a shame
Love, I’m drowning

Been from feast to famine
and all points in between
You know I’m good for the damage
When you cut me I bleed
—Lanegan

“It was spring, it was rainy, it was the early nineties, meaning that Seinfeld was all the rage, and so was Michael Jordan, and so was crack cocaine, the latter of which, at this point, I had no first-hand knowledge. As for Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Jordan, I knew them well. Each evening, having spent my day carrying sixty-pound drywall across damp pavement and up bannisterless staircases in one of the state-of-the-art family residences being pre-wired for the Internet—whatever that was—in a cul-de-sac eventually to be named Placid Village Circle, I would drive to my apartment and watch one or the other, Seinfeld or Jordan, since one or the other always happened to be on. They were famous, they were artists, they were exalted. I watched them and dreamed of my own fame and art and exalt. The more I dreamed, the more vivid the dream seemed to be, until it was no longer some faint dot situated on an improbable timeline, but, rather, my destiny. And all I needed to turn this destiny into reality was to make it out of my midsized city—not worth specifying—and move to L.A., where, of course, an actor needed to be if he was to have any chance at that thing called success. But, from my perspective of a thousand miles, L.A. appeared immense, incensed, inscrutable, impenetrable, and every time I thought I had enough resolve to uproot myself and rent a U-Haul I would quickly retreat into the soft, downy repetitiveness of my home town, with its low stakes, high livability, and steady paycheck from my father.”
—“Audition,” Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

“I managed to squeeze through the narrow part, and then, deeper in, it suddenly got lower, and down from there it was like a small room, like a ball. The ceiling was round, the walls were round, and the floor, too. And it was so, so silent in there, like you could search the whole world and never find any place that silent. Like I was at the bottom of an ocean, in a crater that went even deeper. I turned off the flashlight and it was pitch dark, but I didn’t feel scared or lonely. That room was a special place that only I’m allowed into. A room just for me. No one else can get there. You can’t go in, either.”

“’Cause I’m too big.”

My little sister bobbed her head. “Right. You’ve gotten too big to get in. And what’s really amazing about that place is that it’s darker than anything could ever be. So dark that when you turn off the flashlight it feels like you can grab the darkness with your hands. Like your body is gradually coming apart and disappearing. But since it’s dark you can’t see it happen. You don’t know if you still have a body or not. But even if, say, my body completely disappeared, I’d still be there. Like the Cheshire Cat’s grin staying on after he vanished. Pretty weird, huh? But when I was there I didn’t think it was weird. I wanted to stay there forever, but I thought you’d be worried, so I came out.”
—“The Wind Cave,” Haruki Murakami

“This revelation that my privacy had been an illusion made me feel skinless. He could have been stalking me for weeks before mustering the nerve or will to speak. That unknown span of time seethed behind me, a room filling with smoke.”
—“Intrusions,” Melissa Febos