1961, construction began———the Architect drawing a dream———in poured concrete.
A substantial challenge———to give lodging to Democracy———to give form to the State when she
is still forming———coagulating from Partition and Injustice———nebulous, indeterminate. 1971,
the people demanded Revolution———Independence and Liberation, lofty ideals———petrified
Architect granted Absolution by his own demise. 3000 Moons later———completed
posthumously———they say his ghost haunts the Rotunda———whispers
to Members of Parliament———Spirit & Science———Spirit & Science———Spirit & Science——
—conjecturing whether he got it right———the precise Configuration of Arches to Atriums———
Courts to Porticoes———Aperture to Volume. It’s true———he had not envisioned the serene lake
as Moat———the heftas Fortress———the Machine Gun Military Men patrolling its walls———
the questionable use of that teal carpet———let alone, the Dictator———to whom his specter
gesticulates wildly———something about civic duty———having lost his voice.
Category: Winning Work
New Nukes and Old Ghosts
I did not know until my husband’s feet turned blue, until the tumors conquered his lungs and thwarted his breath, until the morphine drip stilled, and the feeding tube dangled empty of nutrition. Only when no warm place remained to rest my face, to seek his aliveness, only then did I learn that Michael’s father died at 58 of the same aggressive lung cancer.
Only then did I also learn that Dick, his journalist father, witnessed the dawn of the nuclear age. My mother-in-law Katie, the loss of her 36-year-old son merging with her widow’s grief, her white hair neat in its daily braided bun, cast her eyes on her lap, her hands twisting the thinned gold wedding band. She spoke without raising her gaze.
They were handed goggles but no other protection. They were told to turn around.
My father-in-law, dead long before he would have become my father-in-law, returned from WWII to his wife and two children and his career at the Oregon Journal. In 1946 he was invited to attend Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll where journalists witnessed the test atomic bomb explosions aboard the USS Appalachian. Their job: to ease the public’s anxiety about the experiment.
They told him the only hazard was the possibility of sterility. We had two children. We could take the risk.
Later, Dick also witnessed atomic tests in the Nevada desert, where witnesses were kept at least ten miles from the impact sites, except for a 1953 blast, when journalists were trenched two miles away.
Their third child came in early 1947, so Katie must have already been pregnant when Dick left for Bikini Atoll the summer of 1946. In 1948 and 1951 she miscarried twice, something that had not happened during all her previous years of childbearing, before giving birth to her fourth and fifth children. Michael, the baby of the family, arrived in 1953.
You see dear, sterility was not the risk after all.
During the ‘80s, the office of an Oregon senator contacted my mother-in-law as part of an effort to study the cancers of those witnesses and to help them seek compensation. I encouraged her to respond but I don’t believe she followed through. She could not bear the thought of remuneration for her loss.
My daughter’s health remains sturdy at 46, yet for years I wondered if the radiation of witnesses would also damage a third generation, would harm my child who lost her father when she was ten. For a long while I watched studies, although truly understanding them was beyond my scientific abilities. Eventually my vague fear of genetically transmitted irregularities receded into the place where all my other ghosts swarm quietly.
This week, my daughter stunned me with the revelation of her fear.
I didn’t expect to live a long life. That’s why I took so many risks when I was younger.
At Bikini Atoll, artists joined the journalists aboard the USS Appalachian. They documented the bomb’s ability to destroy battleships. They painted the unearthly beauty of an atomic explosion, plumes and puff balls and mushroom clouds in brilliant shades of orange, softer pink, dull gray. They painted Bikini Village after the blast and after the resulting tidal wave. They painted grinning journalists with goggles in place waiting for the blast. They painted the admirals and captains. They painted King Juda of Bikini. They painted battleships waiting, battleships destroyed, the placid sunset that followed, their art intended, like the journalists’ coverage, to ease the public’s anxiety.
My anxiety, eased only by time, resurfaces as President Trump tells the Defense Department to recommence the nuclear testing halted in 1992 at the end of the Cold War, and as the last remaining treaty between the United States and Russia limiting nuclear weapons expires. My roused ghosts murmur, NoNoNo. They paint images behind my eyes.
Shadows of vaporized victims in Hiroshima.
Michael, panicked by morphine hallucinations, gasping for breath.
The long list of cancers that killed downwinders, those who lived or worked downwind of the test blasts.
My ghosts, rustle, sigh, insist I act. We must awaken all the ghosts who will whisper so loudly that you cannot ignore them.
Elián González
I wake from a night sweat
to a cold snap, negative twenty
windchill and the shape of your name
bobbing towards the shore
of the bed. My love brings me
coffee and a question:
tell you the terrible things
now, or tell them to you later?
A boat and a life raft,
a boy and an ocean. Yesterday,
another murder in Minnesota.
Agents in tactical gear, waging war
against the foreign bodies
in their own hearts they never
loved enough to teach to swim.
We hold each other well
into the morning, saying
the loud things quietly,
and the quiet things out loud.
Extra Minutes
The schedule changed on January third. Management quietly adjusted the minutes and taped up a notice beside the time clock—the paper slightly crooked, already curling at the edges. At shift change, people gathered to read it. They studied the margins, the logo at the top, the language that tried to sound neutral.
“They moved it back again,” Paul said, tapping the clock hands with his fingernail. “Three more minutes. Break’s shorter, too.”
Raymond rubbed a circle on the floor with the toe of his boot. “Adds up.”
“By Friday,” Paul said. He waited. “Unpaid.”
Raymond knew they adjusted the clock. Not drastically, never enough to argue over, but often, they nudged the hands back by a minute here, two there, the changes folded into maintenance the way technicians fixed light fixtures or belts. By Friday, the week ran nearly an hour longer. The losses stacked in small increments.
Every day, after Raymond punched in to his shift, he sorted in the distribution center, where boxes and bins cycled by on wide belts. Conveyors carried packages from one end of the floor to the other, then looped back. A closed system. The belts kept their own time. They didn’t wait.
Raymond picked the big boxes. He’d done it long enough that his hands knew a container’s weight before the scanner chirped. When things went well, the work was simple.
Lift. Scan. Stack.
Lift. Scan. Stack.
Precise movements, perfected by repetition. He’d gone slight over the years, his joints storing the work. Sometimes he read the labels without meaning to. Addresses stuck with him, useless as facts.
If something jammed, if a bin tipped, if a label peeled loose, it sent a brief shudder through the line, the metal complaining. Then the work resumed. Sometimes there was a rush, an order flagged urgent, a supervisor hovering close enough to change the air. In those moments, speed mattered. But the belts kept their pace anyway.
In the break room, people talked about the new year. Dry January. Training schedules. A woman from receiving said she’d started waking at four to journal before her shift, like she’d found a way to borrow time. Paul laughed and said he was tracking calories now, like it was a joke.
Raymond listened. Listening cost nothing.
That night, his daughter Lena stood on the counter and circled dates on the new calendar with a red marker.
“Will you fix it?” she asked.
“Fix what?” Raymond asked as he leaned against the sink, rinsing rice. The grains swirled and clicked against the sides of the colander.
“This year,” she said.
Her school had sent home flyers about goals. Raymond folded them carefully and slid them under the sink, where they soaked up spills.
***
On a Thursday, Paul went down in Aisle C.
He wasn’t dead. Just undone. Knees folding. Mouth slack. A complete collapse.
For a long minute, no one moved in to help. It wasn’t clear whether this counted as an emergency.
Raymond hit the stop button and got to Paul first.
“You okay?” he asked.
Paul’s eyes fluttered open. “Skipped lunch. Trying something new.”
The ambulance came. Forms were filled out. The belts paused, then resumed, carrying bins past where Paul had been. The gap closed without anyone commenting.
After work, Raymond drove across town to an empty lot. The engine ticked after he’d parked, the dashboard clock reading 9:17. He should have been home already.
He thought about the hour management had taken in chunks, how it didn’t feel like theft while it was happening.
Instead of driving home, he walked over to the river.
It wasn’t scenic—runoff thick with silt slurrying behind a closed tire shop. Glass in the dirt. A shopping cart tipped on its side. The current eddied past what it couldn’t take, caught for a moment on what it could, then released.
Raymond stuffed his cold hands in his jacket pockets. He told himself this wasn’t rest. He didn’t tell himself anything else. He lingered until his locked knees ached.
After that, he went every Thursday. Not to recover the hour—there was no getting that back. Sometimes, he brought cookies and ate them slowly, breaking each bite in half. Sometimes he did nothing. The time passed either way.
At work, the pressure tightened. New posters appeared beside the time clock.
Own your output.
Use your time wisely.
A supervisor asked Raymond if he’d considered using his breaks more strategically.
“For what?” Raymond asked.
The supervisor smiled. “For yourself.”
Raymond nodded. He was good at nodding.
In March, Lena brought home another flyer titled “Ways to Develop Grit.”
“What’s grit?” she asked.
Raymond thought of the belts, the clock, the way the week stretched without looking different. “It’s staying,” he said.
She watched him wash the dishes. “You stay,” she said, like she was writing it down.
***
Paul came back to the line with a brace on his knee. One afternoon, Raymond watched him clip a pallet with the lift, small cans scattering everywhere. Bright. Loud.
Raymond stooped and gathered them up.
“I don’t know how to stop,” Paul said.
Raymond thought of the clock, the small backward turns. “You don’t have to,” he said. “Not everything at once.”
Later that month, management announced another adjustment. A few more minutes, barely explained. Another correction to the clock. People complained, then went back to work. Complaining took time.
Raymond didn’t say anything. He worked his shift. He clocked out when the screen told him to. He drove home on the same roads.
“You’re late,” Lena would say.
“Yeah. A little.”
Every Thursday, he still visited the river, where that week followed him, minute by minute, where he stood long enough to feel time.
Bury It Good and Deep
“It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it.” Seneca
*
At dawn our crew punches in
to gut out the same day,
another yard, another birth
of deluge pushing from below.
We split the green membrane
down to the marl of earth
tunneling out the turf.
A cold silence sears in me.
The fertile May sun blossoms
above an aged cherry tree.
Dirt clumps in roots like the clench
of small pained fists. The hours breed
our pace as we trench down
to the depth of the burst line.
**
It is mercy that pipe lies deeper
than a child’s grave, a memory
never spoken of. Already
our muscles feel a good day’s work.
The backhoe comes later,
then the smell—wet soil and worms—
hidden within the cut.
The air rings with crow caws.
I drop down the ladder
to fix one seepage in the world.
My skull sunk far below grass,
its thoughts sew in soil like seeds
sprouting hopeless tendrils to dig
into this uterine mud.
***
Filled by dusk, a small scar
mars the perfect yard, yet
every job is just a planting—
each mind roots where each falls.
The days form a forest
that leafs out a fresh life.
Morning finds the same hole
in loam of the next lawn.
Daily I rise broken
to fill the hole of myself,
and bleed salt to salve my cuts.
“Today is still its own good life.”
Dirt, sweat, day, dark, water, bread.
Somehow, this is all of it.
The Regime
Siri sets an alarm for twenty minutes. To shave
to scrub, to lather. Nick myself like a prize cut
season salt into the shank of my thigh. It stings, of course it does:
the kind of burn that blossoms. I slather the butter. Phone blings.
Cauterized, lubricated, ready.
One day I’ll be devastating. Hot enough to ruin dinner
a silence-starter, violence in vintage Gabbana.
Men, burning their lips on cigarettes
spilling the sauce, forgetting their wives. I won’t even notice.
Last year, cleanser broke me: fogged thoughts, red skin
it smelt like bleach and rose. The girls at Vogue loved it.
My pores felt like the problem. I scoured my face
read the reviews. Paid for the shipping.
Who doesn’t love to feel slutty and stupid? Five-inch heels
taut like Eva Longoria at the DNC. The devil’s slit lapping my thigh—blue lace.
He’ll tear the dress. Choke me, gently.
He’ll say: finally. The mirror will say I’m improving.
You have to work for it. Gym, injections, UV.
Wax, bleach, retinol. Serum. Oil.
Burn. Peel. Inject. Repair. Repeat.
Smoking. Salads. Starving.
My therapist says it’s enough.
I set the alarm. Twenty minutes. No cheating.
If it hurts, it works.
If it stops hurting
I’ll try something else.
Terms of Sale
Her parents can’t live
in their house anymore.
The stairs, the driveway
coated with snow,
the hill,
her mom’s hip and dad’s knees,
their diminishing
pensions.
So they decide to sell.
Empty the house,
clean and paint it
so it looks anonymous and bright.
They excise all things personal
except the piano.
Her great-aunt’s piano.
Her great-aunt loved music;
everyone in her family loves music.
Her brother plays metal guitar; her uncles, banjo; her dad guiro when
the spirit moves him.
All of us have crowded around those keys.
But her parents won’t have space
in the apartment they’ll move to after the sale.
It is stairless,
with a metal bar to grip in the shower and
a sidewalk they won’t have to shovel.
So her parents offer the piano
to the buyers they find for the house.
The buyers say yes, they like the look:
the piano is large, old and elegant.
Mahogany.
Only later, a few days before the sale,
the day the government changes
the buyers also change their minds.
Tell her parents to get rid of it.
Her father tries to sell or give it away.
To music schools and churches,
acquaintances and friendly, anonymous accounts online.
He promises to borrow a truck
to deliver it.
A few people call and say they’re interested
but then they change their minds too.
The buyers of the house want it gone.
Her parents realize they’ll have to throw it away. A piano
that is nearly a hundred years old, that supposedly
survived the war.
Her father is resourceful. He says maybe he can
peel off the ivory keys and sell them.
Her mother puts her fists in her ears.
At the dual-language school where her cousin works,
men in black vests with white print try to break down the door,
try to find children to disappear.
Afterwards, she silences her son
when he speaks Spanish in the street.
Her father realizes he must use a sledgehammer
to break the piano,
to turn it into timber,
into disposable bits.
But the hammer slips from his hands.
He cannot destroy it, cannot
tear its keys with pliers,
cannot pull them like teeth.
He has a friend who is new to this country,
who watched
his own country crumble
with a few strokes of a pen.
He tells her father he can stomach it,
that you can stomach anything if you have enough
need.
Says once a thing is in pieces,
it gets easier to forget
what was and wasn’t there.
Relocation
When the woman from Housing knocked, I figured she wanted to sell me pest control. Or solar panels. Or Jesus. I can always tell by the clipboard.
“Ma’am,” she said—ma’am, like I was about to scold someone for leaving a wet towel on the floor—“we’re conducting an occupancy check.”
A man stood behind her, his shirt the color of mop water, the washed-out gray government workers think looks friendly. He held a tablet, my address glowing at the top, my name almost right, off by one letter.
Arguing over spelling never won anyone peace.
I let them in.
They went room to room, tapping walls and photographing outlets as if the house might confess something. The woman trailed a finger along the banister. “You’ve kept it up nicely,” she said. “Mr. Elias will be pleased.”
“Who’s Mr. Elias?”
“The tenant on record.”
After they left, the air smelled like melting plastic. I opened drawers, found my pinking shears, old twist ties, that bent spoon I never threw out. Everything looked fine, I guess, but it felt wrong, like the place had been rebuilt backward, with left where right should be, right where left belonged.
On the fridge, I found a Post-it note with my handwriting. It read: appointment confirmed. The loops were too loose for my cursive, so maybe I’d clicked some online I agree form inadvertently. The government changed files, after all. Maybe it now changed people, too.
That night, I dreamed the house split, quiet as a bone cracking in winter. In the morning, the kitchen reeked of melted plastic again. My chipped blue mug was nowhere to be found. A tin cup sat there instead, stamped Property of the Department of Residence Affairs.
By noon, I heard a key turn in the lock, smooth as butter, and a man rolled a suitcase through the front door. “Miss Carrie?” he asked, which isn’t even close to my name.
“I think you’ve got the wrong house,” I said.
He smiled like a social worker. “I’ve got the lease.” He handed me a laminated card that read 412 Ash Street. My address. The owner was listed as The State. Then he went up the stairs and moved into the guest room.
I spent days on hold with numbers that played a tinny flute tone on repeat. My lawyer—if you can call someone you pay in pizza a lawyer—told me the system showed I’d been relocated six months back. “They’ve got receipts,” he said.
“I never moved.”
“Then you’ll need proof you exist.”
So I sent the department photos of myself in the house—blowing out candles, opening presents under the Christmas tree, petting Minnie, my cat, as she curled on the radiator like a warm loaf. They wrote back: metadata unverifiable; possibly fabricated.
A week later, Minnie vanished. Not a single white hair left on the sofa.
Mr. Elias mostly stayed in his room. I heard him typing, fast, steady, like the house had given him orders. Once I asked, “Why are you here?”
“Everyone needs somewhere to live,” he said.
“This house is mine.”
He smiled, the kind that said you don’t know yet. “Then why does your name keep disappearing?”
Days blurred. Mail arrived for the Current Resident. None for me. My bank account locked itself. At City Hall, the clerk peered over her screen. “You’re listed as temporarily reassigned.”
“I’m right here.”
She glanced at the line of people behind me. “Are you sure?”
Outside, all the front doors on my block had grown small black eyes that blinked red in the dusk.
***
Mr. Elias invited me to dinner. He made rice and beans heavy on the cumin. “No reason we can’t be neighborly,” he said, telling me how he’d lived in the house before redevelopment. “They said the block was unsafe. Moved us out. When they rebuilt, my number came up again.”
Behind him, a pale rectangle marked the wallpaper where my grandmother’s clock had once hung.
“My mother was born in this house,” I said.
He nodded. “Maybe it’s yours in memory, but documents say otherwise.”
After that, I took to the porch. The air turned mean with cold, but it was still free. I watched the streetlights do their little dying act every night—blink, gone, blink, gone. New fences went up, strange cars parked and disappeared, people argued behind closed doors. A drone would pass overhead, dragging its yellow light from yard to yard. Sometimes it paused above me, gave me the once-over like a clerk scanning produce.
After a while, I stopped picking up when Housing called. The woman’s messages always began, We’d like to help you transition.
Transition to where? The moon?
***
The house forgot me. The thermostat wouldn’t listen. The lock refused my key. The floorboards went silent under my feet.
One sleepless night, I opened my laptop and searched real estate listings just to torture myself. There it was. My house. Two bedrooms. Safe neighborhood. Surveillance included. In one photo, a woman who looked just like me stood by the porch light, waving.
I gave up. I packed a coat, a toothbrush, a photograph of my family on a dock in a lake, all of us smiling in the hard sun. Then I walked through each room, memorizing each detail. In the entryway, I leaned into the wainscoting and whispered my name. The wood was pliable. I’d painted that wall a deep teal with my mother when I was twelve. “Color,” she said, “can change your life.”
At the door, Mr. Elias waited, arms crossed tight.
“Will you take care of this house?” I asked.
“I’ll keep it safe,” he said.
I stepped outside and eased the door shut. Snow drifted heavy, steady as static. When I reached the corner, the street was blank. I looked back, but my footprints were already gone.
Somebody Should Do Something
We woke to no running water. Not even a drop fell from our showerheads that morning. The little water we did have drizzled from the faucets. We assumed myopically this was an issue specific to our home, that we would have to call a plumber from our desks at work. It was only on our commute that we realized what had happened. A water main had burst and flooded Tremont Square. Police had closed the road. Men in neon vests and hard hats milled about the ankle-high water. Tremont Square was by the adult language school, in a part of town where most of the tenants were students—renters, not owners. The flooded street ran in front of the liquor store. Across the street, the YMCA. On the town’s flagpole, the old, tattered, thin and translucent American flag snapped. It was fortunate for us because we lived at the top of the hill about a mile away. We didn’t have to worry about our home flooding; we were relieved we wouldn’t need to pay a plumber after all.
When we came home that night, the men in vests were still working and the water had not returned. We were understandably upset. We had grown accustomed to water always springing from our taps, our lights never failing, our supermarkets always being stocked. These conveniences were our birthright. On the news, they explained that the water break had created a small sinkhole, and a young man had (presumably) died that morning when the ground underneath him suddenly fell away. The station had obtained footage of the incident, which, they warned, might not be suitable for young children and the sensitive.
The moment had been captured on the liquor store’s security camera. The time stamp in the bottom right hand corner read 5:47 a.m. The footage was gray and grainy. A dark figure shuffled down the sidewalk across the empty street. The earth opened up. It was almost grotesque, how quickly the man could go from being there to not being there. Even when the station slowed the video down frame by frame, it was almost impossible to process.
More details about the missing man would come out over the following days. He had immigrated from Syria on a temporary visa, he was studying English at the language school, and that morning he had been on his way to the Washington Street Dunkin’ Donuts for his 6 a.m. shift. Some people online were very alarmed. Others posted jokes, such as the clip paired with the caption: “Me when I get overstimulated at the party.” The Christians claimed that this was a sign of Armageddon, that soon, as the Bible predicted, “the heavens will disappear with a roar.” On our own community webpage, faceless usernames confessed that while they didn’t necessarily want anyone to die, they wouldn’t mind there being less foreigners in the neighborhood.
We gave fifty dollars to the victim’s family’s GoFundMe. It wasn’t immediately obvious what else we could do.
In the meantime, they had diverted water from another main; our house was back to normal. We trusted the infrastructure, trusted that the competent people we had elected would fix the sinkhole problem. After all, we paid taxes for precisely this reason. So, we avoided that part of the neighborhood, drove around the commotion on our way to work, adding so much as five to ten minutes to our morning commute.
But the sinkhole kept expanding. The perplexed city officials assured us that they were attempting every measure and tactic to resolve the problem. Yet every day there was a new story of someone who had strayed too close to the sinkhole and had plummeted into its earthy maw. At first, it was mostly other students from the language school, but then we started hearing stories of other homeowners, people that we knew from softball leagues and the farmers’ market, vanishing into the hole as well. Soon businesses shuttered, either because their building or all of their minimum-wage workers had vanished.
At dinner parties, inevitably someone would announce, exasperated, “Somebody should do something about that sinkhole! This is no way to live,” and we’d all nod our heads in solemn agreement.
As the hole chewed closer and closer toward us, shutting down more and more roads, we assured ourselves that if it was really a problem, then people—people more capable, more educated than us—would surely say something. We weren’t engineers. We weren’t public servants. What were we supposed to do? We had debts to pay, cars to wash, meals to cook, parent-teacher conferences to attend, family to pick up from the airport.
The population of our town had rapidly declined. When we went for walks around the surviving half of the neighborhood, there was no longer the sense that we were moving through a town, or a community, or even a civilized country, but rather a raw, sinister feeling that we were exploring the ruins of something.
Last week, the hole began ascending our street. We lost our water again, then the power. We could have left this place, once, but there was no longer a way off of our big hill. For supplies, we had only the reserves in our cupboards, the gallons of water we bought in bulk for such emergencies.
Sitting on the balcony last night, we huddled underneath our blankets and stirred the last of our hot chocolate powder into bottled water boiled over a fire. The sky seemed so low that we thought our heads might scrape against it. If we looked out over the railing, we could stare down directly into the heart of the sinkhole. We had never seen it from up close before. Our voices echoed down the pitch-black cavity. And it was only then, when it was right outside our doorstep, that we realized how wrong we had been to assume that the hole must have a bottom.
Garry Learnt How to Be a Man Off the Internet
Hey there love you look like a fine cut of something I’d like to chew on and spit out for a good time you can’t spit real women swallow the pill for me I don’t like the feel of rubber tires and fast cars down at the track with the boys to have a great time I take up all the time you need you can’t handle what I’ve got I’ve got everything you want my eight inches no nine stacks of cash and a long pipe burst yeah baby I’ll show you how to fix it step aside love let me handle this everyone knows women can’t do a man’s job is to get dirty cause if you’re clean you must be one of them gay boys I’m no gay boy beta watch your wife while I fuck that bitch weighing me down like a ball and chain her to the bed cause I like it when you’re submissive baby isn’t my problem you take care of it like a good housewife I work all day like a real man long hours long jobs a long time in bed with me baby hard and rough hands manly and dry since I wash with only the manliest soap it smells like wood splinters I can’t feel ‘em I’m a man with calloused heart I don’t feel anything I don’t cry like some sissy baby just sit there and look pretty let me handle that heavy load in ya’ any hole I like cause I own you think you’re stronger than me fat fucking chance you’re no man you look like a man with those muscles you must be a man I bet you have a dick but not one like mine it’s a real fat cock sucker you dress like a girl all pretty I don’t think you’re pretty you’re too fucking manly men told me I’m a wolf I’m an alpha I’m on top of you but don’t get it wrong you don’t need to cum it’s your fault for being too dry wall has a hole through it because you’re such a bitch you make me angry you make me fucking crazy about you baby so what do you say do you want to come back to mine?