Is Gone/Are Back
Credit reports
Are gone.
Calorie counting
Is gone.
The addictions counselor
Is gone.
The scrip for clomipramine
Is gone.
Poor cell phone reception
Is gone.
Flying commercial
Is gone.
Spoilers
Are gone.
Capitalism
Is gone.
Jellyfish
Are back.
And not the crafted kind, crocheted out of discarded plastic bags, extensions left behind in beauty parlors, beads, rosaries, the magnetic tape from cassettes made in the 80s for long dead teenage crushes, and anything else Donna Haraway writes in “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” “that can be induced to loop and whirl in the codes of crocheting.”
Haraway says, “Crocheted models of hyperbolic planes achieve their ruffled forms by progressively increasing the number of stitches in each row.”
And, “The Crochet Coral Reef has morphed into what is probably the world’s largest collaborative art project.”
Except it’s not. The world’s largest collaborative art project is the jellyfish. The rise in sea temperatures brought out jellyfish-like supermodels lined up to audition for a real production instead of the catwalk. No more standing still and showing off someone else’s design. These ladies learned to swim. No more plankton like floating on climate change currents. These jellyfish took charge. They wrapped their lace like oral arms around larger life forms and squeezed the soul right out. They washed their doily looking bodies onto the beaches where Ednas and Vondas and Coras crocheted in their beach chairs. They crept up to the senior citizens compression stockinged feet. They stung. They crept back into the ocean, waiting for the tide to do its work bringing the bodies into the dining room to nibble on and nosh, threads of plarn and paracord dancing in the currents like the umbrella body bells of the jellies, full on the end of man.
Mini-interview with Maria Fischer
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
MF: I hate to be that writer, but everything shapes me as a writer. I went to a Planet Booty concert with my 24-year-old daughter and felt a little out of place until I met the lead singer’s dad. My daughter posed for pictures with his son, and we were both just proud parents. A year later I met the author Valarie Kaur at a book reading with my 16-year-old daughter. At both the concert and the book reading, I was so excited to say, “This is my daughter,” and the experiences merged into one poem of that pride the lead singer’s dad felt when he said, “That’s my son!”
HFR: What are you reading?
MF: Radical Inclusion by David Moinina Sengeh.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Is Gone/Are Back”?
MF: I was reading Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, & Nils Bubandt. There really is a Crochet Coral Reef project. The pictures are quite nice. But I keep thinking about nature taking back the world when we’re done with it—how the jellyfish won’t care that we crocheted them. They simply want their ocean back. But I also celebrate the end of credit reports and calorie counting, believe me. We humans waste time on some silly stuff.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
MF: I’m working on a dystopian fiction piece with a young woman and her Babushka (grandma in Russian) walking through the empty cities. It’s interspersed with Wikipedia-like entries of what’s happening in other parts of the world, such as “Is Gone/Are Back”: bodies sliding down the melting Everest, people still trying to walk the Appalachian Trail despite climate change, and what, exactly, will happen to Disney World.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
MF: Look for that pocket of joy every day. The world is on fire. I’m terrified for my daughters. But I read a good book or take a long walk or dance like a mom at a Planet Booty show and realize we’ve got this very moment. Valarie Kaur says it best: “Every day and every lifetime, no matter how hard, contains moments of joy. Notice what made it joyful.”
Maria Fischer is an English teacher with way too many jobs. She also reads and runs, raises five daughters, occasionally acts in community theatre, and hangs out with her husband. Her poetry collection “There Is No One Better,” the Seamstress Says, is available through Bellowing Ark Press.
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Heavy Feather Review 