lucretiars

[lucretiars]

David Berman: Honoring the Collective Void

In today’s world, through any medium you can write a eulogy. That is the magic of language; no matter the vehicle, if something is meaningful, there is no denying its impact. This is the way I felt when I read musician Kevin Morby’s Instagram post eulogizing the late great David Berman, former poet and songwriter of the Silver Jews and Purple Mountains. Morby writes, “David Berman one-liners are like verbal baseball cards. When you find yourself in the company of other Silver Jews fans you all wanna show off your favorite one. He’s been one of my secret handshakes over the past 16 years since discovering his work.” That same magic of language is something that Berman himself was a master of. A Berman-ism is at the same time instantly recognizable yet fascinatingly inventive. A completely refreshing way of seeing something we all internally experience. A deeply universal and profound observation of life disguised colloquial punch-line. No matter the channel, his fluidity, cleverness, and insight using words could forge some new association to a thought or a feeling that you thought was so deeply internal that is wasn’t able to be conveyed tangibly. In Berman’s absence, his words remain and waver potently through my headphones in my ears and on the page I graze my fingers across. And I think, is there a difference between the power of lyrics and the written word? As celebrated for his poetry as he was for his songwriting, Silver Jews was the initial and primary vehicle for Berman’s writing until his first and only book of poetry, Actual Air, was published by Open City Books in July 1999. After a decade of silence post-Silver Jews, Berman’s newest musical project, Purple Mountains, published an album just 3 months prior to his death in 2019. In his music, Berman’s distinctive baritone growling voice serves as an amplifier to his words etched against the background of melody. In his poetry, his words contain the ability to extend his experimental language further than the limits of a song. Through both channels, the writer is veiled behind the guise of the “speaker” or the “singer”. Both create worlds open to interpretation by the masses. Both can hold facets of yourself and both can be crafted with lies, dreams, and fiction. Born in 1991 wading between the grouped identifications of “post-Generation X” and “Millennial”, I was a guinea pig to the internet beginning at a fairly young age. I grew up online late enough that I didn’t have social media or a cell phone until high school, but early enough that I learned and adapted to the strange solace of screaming out into a collective void. I grew up in the emergence of the digital age early enough that when I hear a specific song, I still anticipate the opening chords of the next one on the album because I’d spun the CD over and over, but late enough that I only listened to music on tapes and vinyl for the experience of it, not the necessity. The Warehouse (a CD palace) was my church, and on some Sundays my mom would let me pick one out that I would later on be able to play on my very own boombox, sprawled on the carpet buried deep in the liner notes reading along the lyrics as they played. Words always meant something to me, and I found poetry in everything: in the comment section on songmeanings.com where anonymous users professed their love for a lost memory that the song was associated with, the comments section on Youtube videos where folks anonymously bonded over the gravity this music video had on their life, and the sprawling cacophony of chat rooms and IM exchanges expressing the mundane yet somewhat magical musings littered with typos and faces made with colons and parenthesis. The internet was there for you when nobody else was. It was a conduit to transform some sort of thought you had inside into words on a screen. Words that everybody else could read. When Berman died, that collective void of the internet erupted. Fans of Silver Jews and Actual Air alike joined forces shared their own Berman-isms on social media accounts, blogs, comments on Youtube videos, Reddit posts, etc. I had always heard that along with being a lyricist, Berman was a poet and had his own collection, and after finding myself beckoned through the screen of my laptop and immersed in the world of Berman’s words, I needed to get my hands on it. Amazon was selling books for $200 a pop. eBay was even more. And Drag City, the record label that produced the book, was sold out. On their website there was a button to select to put your name in for an order when they become available again, and though I was doubtful it would even work, I pressed it. Five months later, living in the same city that Drag City operates out of, the same city that Berman last occupied before he died, I receive notice that my book is on its way. Given my taste for always trying to find some meaningful intimacy in the written word, I held this email I received quite close to my heart. Hey there, loyal Drag City customer web 134064-5, We've actually lived up to our end of the bargain – your order has shipped! Keep in mind that all orders are shipped via USPS First Class or Media Mail, depending on weight, so they may take a few days to arrive and there's no tracking number. In our know-everything digital age, isn't it nice to get a surprise in the mail every once in a while? We think so and hope you'll agree. There was something about the candor and sweetness this message held that enveloped me in a wistful appreciation for my love of words and the power they convey. If I can find beauty in this 2-sentence email that was probably just mass-texted to hundreds of people, sandwiched between spam advertisements and bill notifications, I had the dawning realization that no matter the medium, language is hugely influential and the act of crafting it to deliver a feeling that once only lived inside is the raw and subtle beauty of existence. The difference between lyrics and poems is that through poetry, language is the instrument. In music, the words reverberate against a background of sound. Which is more vulnerable? Which is more exposed? Why did David Berman choose to publish the words he wrote on paper and the words he recorded through song? How do we compare the literary resonance between lyricism and poetry? No matter the vehicle, Berman was equally revered for both forms of work, who honored the righteousness of personal experience and was not afraid to expose despair and honesty through art. Through my dive into Berman’s work, I was thrilled to find hidden connections, especially ones that I couldn’t determine if they were purposeful or not. One particularly “deep-cut connection” I found was through the openings of Silver Jews albums The Natural Bridge and Purple Mountains: a slow, almost apprehensive “Well, I….” And “No, I….” (respectively). These articles prefacing the personal claims Berman gets ready to confess next almost serve to give both us and him a moment to prepare. The Natural Bridge kicks off with “How To Rent a Room”, a rumination on death, loss, and coping, and Berman conveys both unease and accepted reflection in “No I don't really want to die./I only want to die in your eyes.” Purple Mountains kicks off with “That’s Just the Way That I Feel”, a circular repetition of apathetic pleading. Berman sings in an almost comedic honesty, “Well, I don't like talkin' to myself./But someone's gotta say it, hell./I mean, things have not been going well./This time I think I finally fucked myself.” In addition to their trepidatious starts, another common aspect of the songs is the juxtaposition of a joyful, energetic melody and dark, pensive lyrics. Berman creates a tune so hypnotically catchy through the verses (including one of the most clever feats of wordplay I might have ever heard with “I've been forced to watch my foes enjoy ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude”) and slows us down in the hypnotic carousel of insatiability in the chorus, merely repeating: “The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting.” The want. How unbearable is it to want? We wake and we want, we rest and we want. We are overflowing with want. In addition to this voraciousness, another powerful aspect of “That’s Just The Way That I Feel” is the fact that these lyrics were the first words Berman gave us after a decade of silence. He illustrates his triumphant return of joyful self-hatred, quintessential honesty, self deprecation, and the confident lack of hope. Not everything has a happy ending. In a particularly notable YouTube video of one of the Silver Jews’ last shows, they jam through a standout song “Black and Brown Shoes” from the album, The Natural Bridge—a fan favorite that includes the palpable and dreamlike depictions of the views around us (“a jaded skyline of car keys”, and “the water looks like jewelry when it's coming out the spout”). Towards the finality of the piece, Berman slows the band, places two hands around the neck of the microphone and instead of continuing with the melody in his voice he reads the next lyric as if it is in fact a piece of poetry: “When I go downtown, I always wear a corduroy suit./Cause it's made of a hundred gutters that the rain can run right through.” After these words are spoken, the melody gradually begins to emerge once again, as Berman drawls the next and final lines in song. The break of song to highlight this almost absurd yet striking musing lets the audience absorb the gravity of the words. In “Pretty Eyes”, an introspective ballad that closes The Natural Bridge, a gentle guitar strums against the concluding verses: “I believe that stars are the headlights of angels/Driving from heaven to save us, to save us/Look in the sky/They're driving from heaven into our eyes/And final words are so hard to devise/I promise that I'll always remember your pretty eyes/Your pretty eyes.” Through an observation alluding to death, Berman illuminates the beauty in physical tangibility against the beauty in imagined personification. Heaven, a beacon of hope is observed against the permanence of memory in the subject’s eyes. Even if everything is lost and through the most delicate nature of fleeting time, that memory will remain. After Berman mutters the final line in “Pretty Eyes”, there is 43 seconds of gentle guitar strumming, almost allowing the listener to reflect on this closing observation. This instrumental decrescendo moans like a lullaby. This purposeful pocket of time in which no words are spoken almost acts as a space in which the listener can consciously do nothing. The song still holds us in its grasp, but we are given the opportunity to mediate on what’s been spoken through the absence of words. “Introduction II” begins the Silver Jews’ 1994 album Starlike Walker. Through slow and jagged guitar chords, Berman drones fragments of words and sentences almost inviting the listener into his psyche: “Hello, my friends/Hello, my friends/Come in, have a seat/Come on in my kitchen/My friends, take it easy”. After these drifting portions of thought, the music quiets and the final lines of the 1 minute song are sung in a juxtaposed conciseness: “Don’t you know that I never want this minute to end?/And then it ends.” This powerful reflection on the passing of time, introduced in such an intimate way, is a driving theme in many of Berman’s pieces. The poem “Classic Water”, which includes brief moments of anaphora and reminds me of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”, reflects on the past in order to somehow solidify a lost memory into a tangibility. He writes, “I remember the night we camped out/And I heard her whisper, “Think of me as a place” from her sleeping bag/With the centaur print.” (Berman 4) Similarly in “Tableau Through Shattered Monocle”, after eight dense stanzas detailing a piece of architecture, the final line reverberates: “These words are meant to mark this day on earth.” (Berman 12) This remark serves to honor the virtue of personal experience—the power in documentation and creating a testimony of a life. Both convey this feeling of capturing the rawness of immediacy; the long-winded desire of marking a certain feeling or moment in a permanent way—making what has been lost somehow last. The final line of the poem “The Moon” acts as a portal through Berman’s process: “And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon.” (Berman 27) The lack of poetic intention in these words is apparent, yet the notion of needing to include that idea of the moon and the evident affect it had on the speaker further conveys the tenderness in capturing emotion and transitory feeling. There is power in observation and inspiration even in the mundane or ordinary. We cradle the things that we have experienced and use them as evidence that we have lived a meaningful life. In a similar notion of using writing as a vehicle to document and possibly further understand the world around us and how the past has influenced us, Berman’s work frequently reflects on the past versus the present, transcending time in order to unearth the absence or garnering of growth. In “Trains Across the Sea” on the Silver Jews’ Starlite Walker, Berman sings “Half-hours on earth/What are they worth?/I don’t know/In 27 years/I drunk 50000 beers/And they just wash within me/Like the sea into a pier.” Berman converses with himself, admitting a loss of the grasp of how time passes and using the organic image of something so cyclical in nature—the incessant serenity of crashing waves—to juxtapose against the perpetuation of habit. Tal Rosenberg remarks in The Fader about this stanza, “There’s the setup, the mechanical pleasure of routine beer drinking, and then the unexpected curve — the situation’s cinematic and symbolic equivalent, an image that beautifully corresponds to the same elegant manner of incremental decay.” In a similar notion of exposing honestly in the mundane and the contemplations of personal development through time, the poem “The Charm of 5:30” closes with the stanza: “In fact, I’ll bet you something./Somewhere in the future I am remembering today. I’ll bet you/I’m remembering how I walked into the park at five thirty,/My favorite time of day, and how I found two cold pitchers/Of just poured beer, sitting there on the bench./I am remembering how my friend Chip showed up/With a catcher’s mask hanging from his belt and how I said/great to see you, sit down, have a beer, how are you,/And how he turned to me with the sunset reflecting off his/Contacts and said, wonderful, how are you.” (Berman 44) In the perfected brevity of “Somewhere in the future I am remembering today” we succumb to the idea of our past selves, drifting in memory on loop in our heads—forever. Every splice of our lives is packaged into a pocket of our brains—and ranging from the absolute thrill to the dreadfully ordinary, the things that we experience serve to influence the way our present and future world is shaped. In addition to the contrast between the aural word and the written word, therein lies even a deeper contrast in experience through both of Berman’s mediums of work. The energetic connection through live performance and the detached, yet intimate connection through solitary listening. The act of presently hearing a reading performed without the ability to see the words on paper and the act of reading the work alone, able to analyze and study the words on paper. What is more significant? What hits you deeper? What experience feels more comfortable, and what experience feels more as if you’ve bore witness to something revelatory? In her article “Measuring the Immeasurable”, Sarah Rothenberg discusses the transformation of “active listening”, comparing the capacity of digesting music before and after the technologic revolution. Before recorded sound became a staple in our daily lives, she explains that music was only experienced two different ways: “One made it oneself or one was in a room where someone else was making it.” She goes on to illustrate an anecdote about a young music lover in the nineteenth century who hears of Beethoven’s newest symphony. After months of waiting, the piano reduction is received through mail, and she hastily stumbles through the piece, attempting to recreate whatever it is that Beethoven has just released to the world. Many months after that, she takes a four-hour journey into Vienna to hear the piece played by a professional orchestra for the first time. Rothenberg presses, “You do not know when, or if, you will hear this work again. How do you listen?” Berman held the capacity to create a realm of “active listening” whether the words were divulged live or not. The solitary experience and the collective experience were similarly an act of power. He reaches with a certain word or turn of phrase and it acts as a gentle tap on the shoulder, urging us to wake up! Look at the world around you! Wade in the reality of your life, because we are all experiencing it. The reverberation of his words by themselves are enough to create a resounding experience, but the haunting dynamic of this thought is the fact that Berman will not be able to perform live in front of us, ever again. His words ring, deafening, into the void forever. We know that we will never hear new work again. How do we listen? As Morby wrote on Instagram after his death, Berman’s words are a form of human connection. The collective celebrating of his work is a joyful and vulnerable experience, and that power of resonance, with anybody, about anything, is reverberating. Even sitting at my laptop last night as I put the final touches on this document, wishing I was a half-drunk hero on a barstool with a like-minded soul but instead, was I a half-drunk sap listening to the Silver Jews, I felt closer to these words I have been so obsessed with trying to understand over the past month. Berman paved the way for acceptance of the candid displeasure of the world; the honest beseeching of meaning; somewhere that the meandering search for identity can float without pressure to comfortably land. From his words, I’ve learned that that very discomfort of “not-understanding “can be the tarmac for our emotions. The process of coming to terms with the things that we witness and feel is just as important as the experiences themselves. As the man himself said, “final words are so hard to devise”. So with that, I salute a cheers to David Berman. Thank you for allowing the space to dismantle the fear of unknowing.

[lucretiars]

The Tooth Sign

I could write about the way I could tell her voice was shaking even before she told me the news. How I walked on the bus and heard the words on the bus and walked right off the bus. I could write about it but I don’t know how.

I could write about the Christmas you slinked through, sitting on the couch all solemn and skinny. You gave me a jar of homemade salve that in the future I would use to put on my nails, making them blushing and glossy. That week you said that maybe you’d see me at the Merrimaker—no—it was Sweet Springs—for a “breakfast shot”: they give you shot of whiskey, a shot of syrup, and a piece of bacon. I thought about what it would feel like to smell breakfast while sitting on barstools. 

I could write about the day after we all found out you died when I went to Coit Tower and saw your name etched in cement from somebody else’s fingers in the past. Who were they? What were they doing now? Who was “Mike” to them? Was their Mike dead too?

I could write about the 2012 picture of you staring back at me as I trained my fingers not to shake lasso-ing an image of a cactus to paste on the front cover of your program in Photoshop. It’s these choices you never thought you would have to make: when you die, should you be illuminated on a screen in color or in black and white? Should you have a 2 px black border with a drop-shadow or a 3 px grey border with a soft-light overlay? It feels too morbid to name the file anything with your name on it or the words “funeral”, “program”, or “memorial” so I name it “cactus” for the big one planted in front of Sweet Springs with the breakfast shot; so large that it veiled the bar’s sign and you could only read the lettering from a low diagonal angle but everybody in town already knew what it was so it was okay that the cactus stood there tall, proud, and beaming. But now the cactus is gone—uprooted and sold on NextDoor—and anybody driving by can tell what the building on the corner of 9th Street is. 

I could write about how the on night you were dying I went to see The Breeders; Kim Deal in a loose black shirt and that big contraption on her microphone that warped her voice and made those sounds that screech in the beginning of Cannonball. When I was little, the album cover scared me so I never did more than glance at it and it was only until I was older that I found out what I thought to be a fleshy, viscous human heart was nothing but a wet heart-shaped stone, the colors edited to contrast against a wiry red. Drivin' on 9 / You could be a shadow / Beneath the street light / Behind my home

I could write about the morning of your memorial when I spilled the Mountain Dew in Chance’s car because the 32 oz barely fit and the plastic part that hugs the cup holder had fallen off and I took the turn too fast. That plastic lid was supposed to bear the strength to keep in all those 32 ounces but it didn’t and the soda drenched the passenger seat just because I took a turn too sharp and I forgot the plastic thing was gone and maybe if I held the cup tighter or remembered to check on the holder because I knew it was faulty or took my time and didn’t rush like I always do the soda would still be in the cup and we wouldn’t have this mess on the rug and it wouldn’t be gone. 

I could write about the fire that blazed outside of the room we gathered in to eat and sit the night after your memorial and how I let the smoke absorb me and settle into the stitching of my coat, knowing it would linger for days until I made the conscious choice to wash the smell out, wash the fire out, wash the night out, wash you out. 

I could write about the night after the call on the bus, after letting it marinade in my gut. The city let me walk, because what else was there to do. I walked from 16th Street in the Mission down Van Ness past what used to be the big Goodwill where every Halloween the whole first floor had costumes for sale for 50% off and me and Harold both browsed the men’s flannel section. I walked across Market Street down the trajectory of the 49 bus that was somehow always crowded. I walked past Boston Market where one time I tried to take an attractive-enough picture in front of it for Boston Punk Matt, past Davies Symphony Hall where me and Ruby saw Casablanca with the live orchestra drinking red wine from plastic mini bottles hidden in our bags, past the alleyway that Spencer’s motorcycle broke down where we had to use the flashlights on our phones to illuminate the greased guts of machinery. These are things that I experienced. They are etched in memory through the tangible things that I can walk on and feel and look at. And you are no longer tangible. 

That night after the call on the bus I walked down Geary and found myself standing in front of the neon tooth sign that I used to make a point to look at every time my bus drove past. I caught it out of the corner of my eye one day and for some reason, it just stuck. This sign was on a part of the street that was always too weird to walk by because there was nothing I ever needed to do on that street and I would always try to take a picture of it on the bus but the motion caused it to blur, so I could never capture it simply at it was—sharp, shining, and smiling. In this way, seeing the tooth up close felt unattainable—something so meaningless in the scheme of things but nevertheless out of my reach. But here I was. In my unnerving robotic stupor after the call from her on the bus the stupid thing stopped me in my tracks. The warmth of the yellow beams of neon reverberated against my cold blue skin and I stared at it in a moment of some sort of delicate stillness. Two things in front of me so disconnected in meaning; your sudden death and this neon tooth; yet I was buried in the actuality of them both. 

The things that I had felt and seen and that had happened to me tingled through my spine as I stood by the tooth and reflected on your silence. The same way that a song can have a whole life in your heart and you can remember it all when you hear it. The same way you can be nostalgic for a moment as it is happening, or you can miss something you have never known. The gaping impossibility of holding on to the fleeting moments of my life all stung so apparent; but I realized that those drifting pinpricks of memory that make up the way we feel about things matter so much. Even if they are just to be felt in transit or written down and never read again. The act of releasing is a form of personal communication; an internal necessity. And it keeps them alive. And it keeps you alive. So I will write about the tooth sign.

[lucretiars]

INSTINCT: fiction draft

As it happened, I had never been to New York before. My 3.6 grade point average didn’t do me too many favors in achieving the vision of jet-setting after graduation to write poems in some supposed cafe near NYU, so it remained a pipe dream. Back then, I settled my fate in the hands of other people’s decisions, so I stayed in California. But ten years later, here we were. We got up at the first splice of the morning for reasons unbeknownst to her but burning a fire in my gut to me. She would know soon. The birds’ dawn chorus shrieked. 

“Dude, I hate to admit this but on a regular day, what I’m about to do here—this first sip of coffee in the morning—is usually the highlight of my day.”  

She dryly smiles and sips from the paper cup, the steam lifting and tangling with the coarse breath she exhales after the swig. “And it’s just going down from here!”

She winks as I lift my equally shitty bodega coffee in synchronicity; the kind of coffee that you can only enjoy with a self-deprecating spirit. We mouthed a dry “cheers!” as men in trench coats puffed cigars walking past. Their stale smoke on this stale morning spun like a relic of a past life. 

There was no one who walked like her: that distinctive gentle jump in her step as though to elucidate some sort of eagerness in motion, something I always tried to emulate but wound up denying due to the sheer embarrassment that it’d never come out naturally. She walks with an out-of-touch maturity, acting on instinct and holding this subtle power of self-awareness. I walk with a dependable hesitation, mimicking the way I handle everything in life. She’d call it “analysis paralysis”; everything is a fork in the road and everything is Sophie’s choice. 

She glimpses at the ragged ice on the ground. 

“It’s cold as hell. This better be worth it.” 

In my periphery I study her movements, anxious for some future reaction I keep telling myself that I am ultimately unprepared for. She doesn’t know why we are here, and in my head, I’m silently trying to determine after what number beer she’ll down tonight to break the news. 

After our mother died, my sister relied on me in a more gripping way; a way that I wasn’t sure how to handle. She died before I learned that she felt the same way about headaches that appear out of nowhere as I do. She died before I learned about the teeth she kept in her jewelry box, about the letters she kept in her underwear drawer. I look at my sister and I think about all the things I don’t know about her yet, like if she associates things with the weather or with the seat she takes on the bus or if she feels nauseous when the light isn’t right. The stuff we internally experience on a daily basis but don’t really think to put into words. The stuff we’ve all got in common that we think is too mundane to materialize into a shared connection. 

The sunrise is scattering against the concrete and there’s a charred chip in the glass window of a building that’s making the light bend. I see it for a moment and then look away. A few seconds later she notices and nudges me to look too, like it doesn’t mean enough if it’s only her to see it. 

“Remember when we woke up hella early to see the sunrise on New Year’s and I saw that white rabbit digging in the yard and we all thought it was some fucked-up omen or something?” 

She laughs in memory and I close my eyes and nod and smirk. An image she shared like it didn’t mean enough if it was only her to see it. 

Electronics buzz out of the dull-lit stores we walk by. There’s more bad news on the TV but in this pocket of time we are both untouched, immune to it all as the wind whistles through our teeth. My palms are cracking in the dry chill and the coffee’s getting cold. We’re getting closer. 

“I never thought I’d say this but I miss TV. Like...that simulated feeling of comfort or something, you know?”

With a quick glimpse of eye contact, I raise my eyebrows in resonance. Our mother died but that is a story for another time, and for now the only thing that I can allow myself to try to come to terms with is the fact that since then I have felt insatiable. An aching longing to ripen in the way she’d want me to. 

We’re walking in New York and it’s cold and I’m scared of what’s in the immediate future. I lead us down an alleyway towards the address etched on the paper burning a hole in my pocket, edges torn and damp from condensation. I look ahead at the scene and suddenly feel a deep familiarity and unexpected sense of attachment even though the prettiest view is under construction. This sight propels some instinct inside; the power of instinct I never had, the power of instinct she always held; and that secret inspiration from her stirs like a whirlwind of possibility. Spiral patterns.

I slow my steps. It’s time; sober save for a shitty-coffee buzz which somehow serves to quell this nervous energy I’m carrying. The voice in my head goes silent as I pace ahead of her and then swivel back around as if to gesture a moment of importance. I’m about to speak when she grins at me in some silent understanding, throws away her coffee cup, and looks on with that imperturbable gaze. She knows.

[lucretiars]

Cherry by Nico Walker

“The taste comes on first; then the rush starts. And it’s all about right, the warmth bleeding down through me. Till the taste comes on stronger than usual, so strong it’s sickening. And I figure it out: how I was always dead, my ears ringing.” I’m standing in the confines of a gorgeously-lit, delicately-balanced bookstore in the second story of the historic Fine Arts Building in the heart of downtown Chicago, light pouring in from the early-autumn golden hour, the crisp and clean pages of this novel jutting smooth and warm in my hands. At the lazy hour of 3:00 pm I’ve got the place to myself; the setting surrounding me a complete juxtaposition of the content my eyes are scrolling through—and this is the line that hooks me. Sober, save for the lingering coffee buzz that gently gripped hold just a few hours ago, I am suddenly hurtled into the body of a war veteran, addicted to heroin, riding a high and planning his next bank robbery. This is the world of Cherry, Nico Walker’s debut semi-autobiographical novel written over the course of several years from the Federal Correctional Institute in Ashland, Kentucky.

Cherry exposes the wrath of Walker’s unnamed narrator, leading readers down a walk through hell, a tender spectacle, an absurd dream, an intimate terror, a candid gut-reaction. There is a bleak disillusionment in the narrator’s trajectory, which allows readers to directly experience the grueling effects of PTSD and addiction. In our narrator, we meet the rough and tattered exterior of a deeply introspective and sensitive person. Mimicking Nico Walker’s literal state behind bars, his created main character wears the façade of the contrast between a metal jail cell trapping a living, breathing human inside.

The foreword of the novel drops you directly in the drug-addled, reality-grappling lives of our narrator and his partner Emily. Coalesced between discussing the plan of that day’s impending bank robbery and ruminating on how they imagined their recently adopted dog would help them get their lives together but now they’re merely “dope fiends with a dog”, the narrator takes a particularly large hit of their vice of choice and wakes up to Emily stuffing ice cubes into his underwear to shudder him awake. The narrator, though a bit disheveled, makes a crude joke about his hygiene and brushes the experience off like nothing, insisting to Emily to hurry up and get her hit in before she’s late for class. While there are glimpses of true affection and observations so saccharine and resonating, Emily and the narrator are distorted in an enabling and detrimental relationship; the kind of relationship that makes you understand the sheer power of denial.

Continuing in the foreword, still written through a backwards-told “ending at the beginning” tactic, our narrator is trudging swiftly yet lightly through the alleyway veins of an unidentified Midwest city after completing a robbery for the umpteenth time. Police sirens gradually piercing louder and louder to symbolize their looming arrival, the narrator unexpectedly finds a moment of contentment in the chaotic purgatory that is the life he knows now and the fate he is yet to endure. He finds a calm pocket of time to marinade on the simplistic hidden beauty of the dreadfully mundane reality around him, remarking, “The sirens are coming up Mayfield now, and the grass is like a teenage girl. And the stoops!—the stoops are fucking wondrous! That’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage—look at them go! This is the beauty of things fucking with my heart. I wish I could lie down in the grass and chill for a while, but of course this is impossible, the gun in my hat could be a little obvious, the money sticking out of all my pockets too.” Through these scattered musings, I found myself reflecting on those past moments that suddenly, when we fear something actually really fucking bad may be about to happen, or we fear the possibility of reality becoming so twisted and wrong, we suddenly find gratitude in the minuscule speckles of beauty around us. And through Walker’s brutal, tender, and grippingly honest narrative, these bare slices of time—the impossible-to-name fleeting moments of life that keep us from completely losing it all when everything is falling apart—are unraveled through Cherry.

To be frank, the largest appeal of the book when I first picked it up was the process in which it was created. Nico Walker, still currently serving an 11-year sentence for robbery, crafted Cherry over four years behind bars. In his acknowledgements, Walker outlines the severely manual process of communicating with his publisher, Matthew Johnson. Each edit and recommendation given to Walker was expressed through weekly allotted phone calls. Unable to bring even a pen or paper along for documentation, their discussions were to be memorized and then divulged back in his cell. Walker writes, “The manuscript wasn’t so much a manuscript as it was a plastic bin full of paper. Every page has been rewritten one hundred times over. There was no Word file. It had all been done on a typewriter.” Somehow, this seemingly insufferable feat emerged with such power. Walker’s dialogue is crafted with such rhythm and realism that it mimics an old friend spouting the tales of their life to you at a party, drunk with grace and ease. But buried in the nature of what Walker is actually spouting to us is deep unease.

At the start of the novel, Walker introduces two widely juxtaposing quotes. The first, by Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nashe from his 1600’s play Summer’s Last Will and Testament reads:

“Such use these times have got, that none must beg, but those that have young limbs to lavish fast.”

And, by popular country singer Toby Keith from his Americana southern anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”:

“And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you.”

Though worlds apart, these contrasting lines set the stage for Walker’s approaching journey. Initially used by the army in attempts to indict inspiration and patriotism in its soldiers, the fake plastic spectacle of the red-white-and-blue vomit becomes a comment on the brainwashed nature of American pride. Walker’s inclusion of Mr. Keith’s phony lyric at the start of his novel exposes a harsh reality to this otherwise overplayed tune. Often referring to it merely as “that Toby Keith song”, the narrator is resistant to the patriotism of his fellow soldiers. In an already hollow and alienating battleground, this further detaches him from his surroundings.

Intermixed with code-heavy language in the Iraq scenes, the authenticity of Walker’s war scenes will surprise you. Mingled in the muddles of mechanistic day-to-day routine, our narrator faces harrowing sights and experiences that force him to dig into the reality of who he is at the core. A la Full Metal Jacket, the army scenes are at times darkly comedic and other times so shrewdly acerbic, exposing each comrade our narrator interacts with as a true individual so nuanced that there’s no way they weren’t real. Amongst them are Specialist Grace who looked like Jean-Michel Basquiat and had an 18-year old wife waiting for him at home, Sergeant Bautista, to which our narrator gets stuck in the almost dull routine of draining the abscess on his ass every night while he plays Madden, and a man who was only referred to as “Arnold”, who had dreams of being a computer genius and “bringing down Bill Gates”. It’s disclosed that all three of these men will not be alive when the narrator goes home, and Walker writes with such viscous detail as if to honor their memory.

Sprawled across six parts: “When Life Was Just Beginning, I Saw You”, “Adventure”, “Cherry”, “Hummingbird”, “The Great Dope Fiend Romance”, and “A Comedown”, readers are rapt along the narrator’s tour through love, violence, crime, and everything in between. The novel’s trajectory mimics a drug’s high—the initial excitement, the hidden fear, the gentle roller-coaster crescendo, the exhilaration, the subdued serenity, the banality, the regret, the car-crash decrescendo, the reality.

Walker writes with such an unexpected tenderness that even though his experiences were nothing short of foreign to me, I was catapulted into the perspective of the narrator’s psyche. Chapter Fifty-Two, the entirety spanning one long paragraph (Walker’s chapters range from quietly sparse to compressed and bursting) begins and ends with the sentence, “There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin.” In-between the graphic and miserable terrors the drug wracked on the narrator and Emily, Walker’s prose delicately weaves in the joy, bliss, and wildness they both experienced, reminding me of Mark Renton and his crew in Trainspotting. I believed Walker’s narrator felt paradise and passion in the transitory moments of his addiction. That harsh truth illuminated through these pages transform “The Great Dope Fiend Romance” from merely a staggered semi-autobiographical account of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to a stark observation of the reality that is the opioid epidemic. And as a part of the whole that is Cherry, this honesty becomes even more heartbreaking sandwiched between the terrors of going to a war way too young and naïve and resorting to crime as a means of coping. Walker writes about the emergence of the narrator’s newfound vice: “I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation. Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit. With robbery it’s a matter of abasement. Are you abased? Careful then. You might rob something.”

In a brief wholesome moment after treating his dog to a Wendy’s cheeseburger, Walker remarks through his narrator, “She reminded me of myself, insatiable.” In this fleeting reflection towards the close of the novel, I began to understand the gravity of the narrator’s losses and residual search for meaning. After experiences in combat stripped so much of himself away, the blissful yet impossibly impermanent highs he continued to chase with drugs, love, and crime were simply insatiable. Everyone can relate to experiencing the act of yearning, and I think that Cherry illustrates the simple notion of yearning for middle ground. Between the mundane and the chaos there is harmony, and without explicitly expressing it, the narrator pines for something solid to hold on to. The voraciously unquenchable lust for purpose.

Cherry feels like a process of dehumanization, but dispersed through even the bleakest moments, there are searing glimpses of human fragility and vulnerability. Through Walker’s narrative, I followed his character down a slowly sinking spiral, floating between some warped sense of hope only to find it disguised in obscurity. I was left wishing, grasping for a light at the end of the tunnel; but sometimes, there is no light. For Nico Walker, maybe there will be. But to write with purpose is to write the truth, and in his echoing honesty there is beauty.

“I was feeling melancholy, but it was a calming melancholy. Life was fucked but I was good. This was what I knew. And fate was fate. My heart was full and life was precious.”

[lucretiars]

Lucretia Samuel is a writer and artist living and working in Chicago, Illinois after living her whole lil life in California.

Chicago Zine Fest, 2018

LitCrawl San Francisco, 2017

San Francisco Zine Fest, 2017

Forum Magazine Visual Arts Editor, 2017

Forum Magazine Launch Party, 2017

Los Angeles Zine Fest, 2017

East Bay Zine Fest, 2016

[lucretiars]

Women of Hitchcock

collage on paper, 2016

11″ x 17″

[lucretiars]

TEXT IS KILLING US 2

"Text Is Killing Us 2" is the sequel to its predecessor of the same name. It was completed in the spring of 2017 and debuted at the Los Angeles Zine Fest. “Text Is Killing Us 2″ contains illustrations and hand-written poems outlining the rise and fall and rise again of relationships and the intimacy that can be obtained through technology at a distance. 30 pages black & white 5.5" x 8.5"

untitled

i am trying to write about you

but my body won’t let me

i am singing you a song

in a silent film

and all i see when i touch myself

is the kindness in your eyes

sex isn’t my own

my legs aren’t my own

warmth isn’t even my own

because you’re attached

the connecticut yankee

i’d go the whole wide world

to hear this song behind your

laughter, looking

at a solid feeling of

how i’ve never loved you better buzzing

in front of me like a

tangible thing i could hold

and it stings in my head,

the graced impossibility of the way

i met you by accident

[lucretiars]

PLEASE COME AGAIN

"Please Come Again", title inspired by a sign I saw in a laundromat on Clement St, is my newest color photography and poetry zine. It debuted at the East Bay Zine Fest in December 2016. Featuring photographs of the Richmond District in San Francisco, “Please Come Again” documents the spring seaming into the summer seaming into the fall. It is about how quickly and easily we can associate things we see around us every day with people and emotions. The past haunts us and it can seem like everything is tainted by memory, and the poetry in this zine is centered around growing through that, being grateful of what its given us, and moving on. 50 pages color 5.5" x 8.5"

the shower

in front of the mirror i stare at myself straight in the eye as i unbutton each button, the middle one missing. posing and dreaming of nights i had yet to live in this shirt. rose colored nights that wouldn’t happen. when i was younger i didn’t anticipate these nights all alone. everything was flash and allure, just as my dreams still are. just one week prior it was you and me, leaping from my sheets we had stained with sweat and climbing into this warm water where i stood behind, freezing to death for you, washing and scratching your back while the stream steadily poured on your chest. tonight as i arch my neck back, hot water leaks into the bottle as the beer travels down my throat. i will get out and stand at this page alone, freezing to death for me, punching these words so i will no longer be gnawing at the bone just trying again to document.

our love III

mini mason jar in my pocket and i am

walking around

delicately touching all of the things in my neighborhood

that you have stained.

there is a feeling that follows me on these streets

when i smell fruit and smoke

and it’s the closest to you i can get.

you ride on the coattails of every gust of wind that kisses my skin and

i can’t capture it or

write it down

so now i just

bathe in it

and we both go on living.

pet sounds

in my dream there are palm trees and hula dancers and it is maroon, dark yellow, and cobalt blue. it wears a warm breeze. it sounds like pet sounds. i dreamed it on my grandparent’s pull out bed white and rusty we assembled on the carpet in the living room. it is so far away. it is impossible. that day i was given boxes of sugared things i was never allowed and they turned dull the second i held them. the allure tasted sweeter. i am laying on your bed feeling the flesh that wraps my waist and when i breathe in and out i feel myself pulsing against my palm like a water bed. you are in your chair and i watch your back and shoulders lift and settle as your fingers squeak the strings you play. light on your curved blade cascading, light dripping off the tips of the blanket that my feet cannot reach. a cup with ash and milk in it and a tender flicker in the lights. i think about the paradise in my dream and how i don’t want to taste it. i’d rather let it spark and seep out of people like you, who don’t even know it. you are maroon and yellow and cobalt blue. you wear a warm breeze. you sound like pet sounds.

[lucretiars]

DOWNERS

"Downers" is a photo + poetry zine documenting cement engravings found throughout San Francisco. Intermixed is poetry and prose centered around the significance and effect of how landmarks can trigger us and how quickly and easily we can associate things we see in daily life with people, feelings, and memories. After a year of collecting photos, it was completed in May of 2016. 28 pages color 5.5" x 8.5"

III

i don’t know why i’m on california street everyone is richer than me i respect it but i am proud of my dirty t shirt i wish i was a morning person i am mad at the hills in this city i want you to take me to the south and feed me crawdads i want to get sunburned with you on a hot day i want to jump into a dirty pool covered with maple leaves i envy your ease sometimes i write things and leave the bad parts out you can read me like an old folded book the book the moved with you to every new city the binding getting more frayed each mile west you went i don’t agree with what you said outside on the rusty patio furniture but i heard you out i love you anyway

[lucretiars]

SHIRLEY

"Shirley” is a black-and-white photo zine documenting photos discovered in my grandmother’s dresser drawer from a road trip her family went on up the West Coast in 1948. Each photograph is etched with handwritten notes on the back. I thank her for letting me borrow these pictures to memorialize this portion of her beautiful life. 28 pages black & white 5.5" x 8.5"

[lucretiars]

TEXT IS KILLING US

"Text Is Killing Us" was made in January of 2016. Contains illustrations and hand-written poems centering around how we connect with people through technology. 28 pages black & white 5.5" x 8.5"

the way your face looks

call me “baby”

kiss me

when my eyes are

closed

when i’m sleeping

in the morning

half awake the way

your face looks

when you talk to your

friends

and laugh with

your hand still

on my leg

bury your head in my

clavicle

i was in the other room

when my computer on shuffle

started playing your podcast

and i couldn’t handle

the twang in your voice

i hear it

in other people i

want to ask them

are you from new orleans

[lucretiars]

North

You’re taking a train north and you’ll

pass right through me, pass right

through me

10 pm

i’ll be slow motion smoking

or in the middle of a sip of a

cheap bottle

thin wind

outside

still warmth

inside

20 miles west of your speeding train

last night i hushed in your ear the stories

i had stuck in my head

of my palms open, skimming your skin

and you said you told your father you loved me

or felt as much as what love might be

i have

doubts too.

but i feel

as much too.

tonight the bus jostles my shoulders

when i listen to this song

and you’re still on the train

in the dark

with nothing to look at outside the window

South

Three weeks

and You are barreling south

and i sit in my same

state

i am frightened too

gripping at the wheel startled stopped

at the fork in the road

i think of your mother and father

kissing in that photograph

His hands gripped on Her cheeks

so softly

as i

have touched yours

you see me in her mouth and

i see you in her

Everything

i think about you noticing the rips in

the paper of the note i sent you

the curves

born from my touch

“i like crying with you"

                                               "it feels real”

i wish i could be

the capsule that will touch your

tongue

the finally cigarette

the real sleep you get for ten

minutes

but i am the mountain you won’t see

through the window

but you know is still there

overnight

when the train is dark

[lucretiars]

PRETTY

"Pretty" was made in January of 2016, displaying poems cut-and-pasted over various photography and images. Cover photo from "Vertigo" by Alfred Hitchcock. 15 pages color 5.5" x 8.5"

Pretty

the clouds are gently locked

patchy but still connected

it is cotton balls

it is marshmallow

and it is beautiful like this

and i think “i wish you were here”

just so i could point my finger up and say

       hey                  look at that

like it doesnt mean enough when there is only me here to see it

my hair still curls in the same place it did when it was long

even though i cut it all off

i look at it when i bounce downhill

and the angle of my eyes show me i am the only one who can see it that way

there’s more bad news on the tv and i’m imagining what it feels like when a bullet enters your leg from behind

but i am untouched

and only see evil unfold through a screen

i am not untouchable

i am just lucky

you told me once a poem about a man riding a train that ran down the coast passing the ocean

a young boy looked at him and said “it’s not pretty”

and he realized that to be true

it feels good to ride my bike again

the wind is crisp

the wind is thin

the wind is whistling through my teeth

and i am smoking more during the wintertime

i lined 7 cigarettes straightly on your nightstand the day i left

because of nights like these

that i knew you would feel too

i look at the stars and think again how i wish i could nudge you and

point up to this thing of sudden importance

just to show you something seeming bigger than ourselves

just to show you what a wonder it is

just to show you something pretty

but it is not.

[lucretiars]

Honey

i think about you

before you met me

on the boat

the captain’s voice crackling between each cigarette

your palms cracked from rope burn

and what was i doing

when you arrived “home"

so happy

to be “home”

i think about us

sitting on the steps

writing my teeth on the pole

its quick and it smudges

but it stays

for months

i tasted like the beer i drank to calm my nerves

and you tasted like the cold salty night that we dove headfirst into

i think about me

sitting on the roof of the car

looking up

and saying that if i was alone

this is something i would want to share with you

and now i am

i think about how

i led you into bars

to put my face on your cheek in the public eye

and lead you outside just to touch you

without anybody else around

last night you said you had sugar teeth

and you brushed them off in the bathroom

i could still taste the sweetness

when i remembered it

i rest my head back

expecting ache

but it’s like

nothing has touched me yet

and I’m just waiting

for the sting

my last meal sits in my stomach

under this dead weight of a chest

and our heads are rolling backwards

in my passing thoughts

i rewind it all

like a vhs

with static lines and warm color seeping in the corners

and its in slow motion

and its in fast forward

at the same time

i grip your arm

and we run around

ill breathe a sigh of relief

the lights go on and off

on and off

and I’m at the kitchen sink

and I’m leaving

and i’m coming back

and our mouths are gaping open in the middle of a thought

and our mouths are grinning in such a simple way

like the innocence of waving to a stranger out of a train

and we sleep

and we wake up

and my clothes are back on

and off

and sweat drips

and i wash it off

and i splash water in my face

and you spit water in my face

and my muscles tighten

and i stretch my arms and twist my ankles

and our bones curl and fit like the metal of a chain link fence

and you flick your strings

and i smile at your back

and blue glows on your hands

and the window will open

and sun will crawl on your shoulder

and the window will close

and my hand will grasp your arm

and my mouth will brush your jawline

and i trace your eyebrow

and every askew strand of your hair

and feel your skin

salty skin

sticky skin

ice cream skin

and my alarm goes off

and we fall back asleep

and my alarm goes off

and we fall back asleep

and we light our cigarettes

with the same flame

and i throw the butt out the window

and it sparks on the road

and we drive fast

where’d you park the car

and slow

where’d you park the car

and stop in the parking lot

twisted in our seats

for hours

facing each other

for hours

mirroring each other’s every move

and nothing else

touched us

you and me

coated in honey

[lucretiars]

BEYOND

"Beyond" was made in the summer of 2015 ad contains poetry, 35 mm film photography, collage, and sketches. 50 pages color  5.5" x 8.5"

The Angry Taxi Driver

i remember when i made my mom drive me to santa maria to get cherry shoes because a girl i thought i should’ve looked like wore them

i remember watching girls flip the waistbands on their shorts in PE so more of their thighs would show

i remember when we laid on the roof of the old school and he told me “you know you don’t look that fat when you’re laying down”

i remember taking a natural light from the refrigerator in my grandpa’s garage and drinking it the night he died and hiding the can under my bed

i remember seeing a picture of my father holding me in a hammock and wondering what he looks like now

i remember when he wrote me a letter on my sixteenth birthday and signing it with radiohead lyrics

i remember hating him for what he did to me and my brother

you told me you wished you could have been more happy than you remember you were in past experiences

when you were so worried

or thought you were

when everything

really

was good

when you laughed until your sides hurt

at the angry taxi driver

and i sat in a towel and smiled at you

i fight with this everyday

i wish i could be happy

instead of remembering when i was happy

[lucretiars]

Butterfly Kiss

i’ve been repeating the first two songs on pink moon

his last album before he ate too many pills

i didn’t know that until you told me so

a song played the whole way through as i stood at the doors of the bus

waiting for 20 kids to shuffle off

hand in hand

or wandering

or stomping just to make noise

i used to feel annoyed when this happened

but they don’t care

they don’t even know what annoyed means

mine ins’t worse

theres isn’t

everything is a boulder on your chest when it’s right in front of you

no matter how little you are

or how many hands are searching for yours in a crowd

i used to hold on to my mother’s wrists

and we would microwave ice cream

and say good night with our eyelashes

now i circle fingers around my own

and dinner is either a chore or a hobby

and i can’t remember what time i fall asleep

it comforts me somehow knowing even this will change

[lucretiars]

BENEFICIA

“Beneficia" was made in the spring of 2015. Contains xeroxed collages/drawings/photos, poems, and featured photography of Robert Doisneau. Cover available in b&w, red, blue, or pink. 32 pages black & white 5.5" x 8.5″

Untitled

my teeth hurt when I’m doing the dishes

it tastes like copper and makes me feel like shit

in my dreams they’re hanging on by a thread

i need your reassurance

i want my name stamped on your forehead

i want to dig my nails in dirt and never ever again have to

think about the consequences

i am a dull routine

i am a pale shade

i am a missed bus stop

i am a tarnish on a chunk of clear glass

you are a new shortcut

and the color

and a car ride from a friend

and the chip in the glass that makes the light bend