How do people survive?

An error in the prophecy like a ring in a fish. I believed spring would come, and in it would I find my better heart. I wanted sugar, dyed and molded into dusty femurs, to wander the antique store of her former lover now disgraced, more time, and a baby. It was all there in the document, but I couldn’t read a word.

How do people survive?

Some are theologians. Some don’t. My sister texts me in the morning. She was talking to a friend from college who said that any woman’s effort to achieve normative beauty standards is bad for all women, since by comparison it makes the women who resist that pressure look even more ugly, old, and fat. She wanted to know if I agreed. I said I don’t know, but it begs the question: ugly, old, and fat? A fear can be a bridge, an egg can symbolize redemption, wealth, possibility, impermanence.

How do people survive?

My students are worried about whether or not I’m gay. I’m worried about a lot of things. I tell them good writing should be stupid, but I don’t know how to expand on this lesson without talking about sex, so we are at an impasse to the side of learning. I say in his life, Baudelaire knew love as well as debt.

How do people survive?

I see myself encircled in a ritual I don’t understand. I’m responsible for something, but my hands are tied. My failure here is both prolonged, erotic, lifted. Try drawing a horse from memory. Pretend you are someone else and send an email. If it happened before, it will happen again, said the ax with an air of melancholy.

Live at the Purple Onion

You might be pleased to learn my new routine is coming together. I’ll explore the Wendy’s menu, what your uncle used to order, and the sounds people make when chasing umbrellas down a crowded beach. People talk a lot about comedy and pain. People go to France only to be disappointed. Sometimes people, pre-disappointed, they go to France. In their disappointment, there is comedy. “The real thing,” I was searching for and you were also searching for, scientists taking a break, snails approaching an intersection. Personally I did not care for the way they used “precious” as an insult, forgetting gems, forgetting moments. The only motion I recognize across contexts is stumbling, a grammatical error for your legs. Maybe you are the snake and I’m the leaves, I’ll say to my audience by way of greeting. Maybe I’m the snake and you the feet.

~ ~ ~

Consider the conditions under which something isn’t funny anymore, what necessary but perhaps imperceptible changes. To not see the stone you trip on because you are looking at the stars. That’s rich. Somebody tenderized that chicken. Somebody babied that car. That was then, somebody is a different person now. I stopped my heart. In the same way that anyone is a museum transporting its permanent collection to another museum’s storage. Another courtly Monday. The joke is that you think I lost control of my language, but in truth I never rabbit.

~ ~ ~

Abbreviating “very” as just “v” is v sexy. Sometimes I do it but then add back the -ery because I’m not sure we’re ready. I try to contemplate mortality to heighten my latent humor. I imagine her as a bat in a flower, the driver behind the driver asleep in the drive-thru lane, a display pile of carrots in a produce section at dusk, a ticket-taker for a novelty train. If every separation is also a link, that certainly explains your words. Do you think I would be funnier as a physical comedian? I’ve been working on my impression of a spider plant. The joke is it’s plastic. Last night when I couldn’t sleep I watched tennis in Australia. The announcers spoke endlessly of AC/DC, which was pretty funny. With each stroke the ball sounded like something popping in another room. V sexy.

~ ~ ~

I’m listening to this woman who can’t stop making herself laugh. Sort of amazing to use your mind to cause in your body something as physiologically uncontrolled as laughter. No screen gods, only small prizes, mint sandals. At its base, the laugh is the coffin’s visiting cousin, a twin goose, health nut. I’d never seen so many hot dog stands in my life. For a moment in laughing, it is necessary not to care, in the way that love must be somewhat cruelly indifferent, a vegetable floating in a hot tub. Try as I might, I keep learning lessons I grow weary of retelling. For every city, each person has their own representative. On the beach, waiting in line for my turn to hit the tetherball, watch it swing its little trap.

~ ~ ~

Rotating my plate on the table I’ll say, “There’s my certificate!” I don’t know, it’s like longing to convey the hilarity of eggs, cracked and swirled and heated and piled, for money. Performance is a type of job that’s always existed, and also a personality type. “These are free lessons,” he shouted to the assembled, gesturing vaguely, “I’m just giving it to you.”

~ ~ ~

Material feminism. My changing body, which changes my mind. I think it started with a fear of looking a fool, or feeling one. Every day my first rodeo, unrepeatable, a coded secret, light as air escaping a balloon. I was waiting for someone to cast a spell on me, working through the night, watching television, unraveling from an abscess. I look at the baubled mirror and say “Hey tornado, why the cow face?”

~ ~ ~

I finished college and got a job selling condos in New Rochelle in a renovated paper factory. I’d sit in a living room that was also used as a storage space for prop furniture and a few fake flowers and talk on the phone and cry. My boss always wanted to know who I was dating, just to know. On the train to New Rochelle I’d eat bread and honey, make a little mess then clean it up. I was determined never to sell a loft, which required no determination, they weren’t good. But to be safe, I’d say the building smelled, the laundry made your clothes dirtier, everyone who lived there fell under spells, gradually forgetting everything, forgetting that they were spellbound, forgetting their address. When finally I left that job, the other people who worked there told me incredible stories of our boss’ exploitative practices. I twisted my ankle running down the stairs from his apartment in the dark, scared of him by this point, and then still went to a show in the back of a Mexican restaurant, where it swelled to disgusting proportions. I didn’t notice the pain until I was almost home, and with each step an ache rattled out more sharp than an ancient star hidden behind my silly head, but nevertheless there.

~ ~ ~

I dreamt I was sneaking into an ex’s apartment to repot the succulents, and when I was confronted, what I felt more than anything was guilt. Both weak and brave in the outdoor elevator, my heart like a turkey’s, the real barrel of laughs. I had to make a phone call but couldn’t, administering my career in comedy as if I were a nurse. Some people love to be belittled, in the shadow of the stage, their beer warm between their fingers, their stomach acid silently working on dinner. I’d follow them anywhere—off a cliff, anywhere at all.

Laura Henriksen's first book, Laura's Desires, is forthcoming from Nightboat, and an excerpt is available as a chaplet from Belladonna*. She works at The Poetry Project and lives in Sunset Park, Lenapehoking.