Middle Pain
Up against the faceless ghost clock The inner mechanism slows and shifts. Phone calls cost a quarter. Put the coin in The silent ghost clock tracks time, Up against the eternal ghost clock Mini-interview with Naomi Bess Leimsider HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? NBL: When I was about eight years old, I was obsessed with reading the Oz books. There were fourteen available at the time, and I read them over and over. One day, I realized there would never be a new Oz story for me to read. I had already started writing little stories, little poems, little plays, and I enjoyed writing them, but then there was the moment when I realized I could write more Oz stories. There could be more Oz stories, and I could write them. In that moment, I really understood what I could do. What could be done. What it meant to want to do it. To quote Denis Johnson from “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”: “I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere” because the memory, and the feeling of that moment, is what keeps me going when the work is difficult, when it feels easier not to do it. HFR: What are you reading? NBL: Jenny Offill’s novel Weather. It is terrifying, gorgeous, incredible. And I am re-reading James Baldwin’s essay collection Nobody Knows My Name because it is always time to re-read Baldwin’s essays. Also, I am re-reading Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons in Physics. I cannot understand basic mathematical concepts to save my life, but Carlo Rovelli can teach anyone how it must feel to really understand quantum physics. HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Middle Pain”? NBL: I wrote a few lines about making a life-changing phone call in a phone booth. Once upon a time, you had to look for a working phone in a phone booth. Phone booths were everywhere, even in the middle of busy streets and highways. When you closed the door, a phone booth became its own little world. It’s a very different experience than making a call on a cell phone. I didn’t know what the poem was about yet, but those few lines kept pulling me back to it. It eluded me for months. I needed to find my way into the “how it feels to make that call” part. I needed an extended metaphor. I played around with a few ideas, and then I read an article about a ghost clock exhibit at the Smithsonian. That was it. HFR: What’s next? What are you working on? NBL: I’m working on the last few poems for book # 2. I love putting together a book because it reminds me of the way I listened to albums when I was a teenager. The way themes, structure choices, diction choices, images, and sounds all connect really matters. Also, this book is dedicated to my dad, who died this past February. Several of the pieces attempt to make sense of what happened to him in the last few months of his life, and the other pieces explore the way the world can shift and shift again. The way it shifted after he died. HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share? NBL: Fight fascism. I think illiberal ideas can be seductive—and contagious—so we must all make sure we are paying close attention all the time. Fascism can feel inevitable, but it isn’t. Democracy is risky, difficult, imperfect. The best of us can become impatient with how messy and imperfect it can be—and for good reasons—from time to time. But we must pay close attention to our own behavior. And read history, all histories. And read news from around the whole world as often as possible. And remember that the people who wrote Project 2025 are absolutely serious, so everyone opposed to it should take it—and those who want to use it to change our government—seriously. Don’t give up on democracy. Naomi Bess Leimsider’s poetry book, Wild Evolution, was published by Cathexis Northwest Press in June 2023. In addition, she has published poems, flash fiction, and short stories in Mantis, Unleash Lit, Packingtown Review, Tangled Locks Journal, The Avenue Journal, Booth, Anti-Heroin Chic, Wild Roof Journal, Planisphere Quarterly, Little Somethings Press, Syncopation Literary Journal, On the Seawall, St. Katherine Review, Exquisite Pandemic, Orca, Hamilton Stone Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Coffin Bell Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Newtown Literary, Otis Nebula, Quarterly West, The Adirondack Review, Summerset Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Pindeldyboz, 13 Warriors, Slow Trains, Zone 3, Drunken Boat, and The Brooklyn Review. She has been a finalist for the Acacia Fiction Prize, the Saguaro Poetry Prize, and the Tiny Fork Chapbook Contest. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize nomination for fiction. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
again. Time is of the essence.
Waiting for the one-sided
middle pinch,
that sets it all in motion.
Cycle in. Cycle out. So, so smooth the way it
sheds and grows.
How it all goes.
Only able to harness stillness,
can’t control its absence,
so run like the devil across to the median strip,
that narrow no man’s land divided down the middle,
and make a late-century phone call
in a mid-century phone booth
in the middle of the concrete island
in the middle of a highway.
and make the call.
Make the call in the phone booth
in the middle of the land in between.
In the place that goes in
different directions.
Where decisions don’t have to be made.
Where you don’t
have to ask permission.
In the middle of the highway,
in the phone booth,
do what needs to be done.
Waiting for the one-sided middle pain
that won’t come.
and the race against its absence.
The middle pain of being neither here nor there
or anywhere really.
Not being able to find the way, get it all going,
get the ball rolling
again, so run like the devil and find the phone booth
in the middle place,
in the middle of aching,
in the middle of the highway.
Make the call. Do what needs to be done.
Count time: all the seconds, minutes,
as they go by.
again. The way it is shrouded, deceptive.
The way it should spin clockwise then go
back and forth
back and forth
but not this time.
In the middle of things.
What needs to be done.
Cycle in. Cycle out.
Midway, it always shoots through,
so run to the middle
of the concrete island,
in the middle of the highway,
make a late-century phone call
in the mid-century phone booth.
The landscape, the grid, the clock.
Faceless, still: time itself.
Make the call.
Do what needs to be done.
Waiting for the one-sided middle pain
that won’t come.
Heavy Feather Review 