Glow
“Gardening. No hope for the future.” In the second part of my life, I am living in a graveyard made of the first part of my life. In the first part of my life, I did things. In the second part of my life I do not. In between the first part of my life and the second part of my life there was a third part of my life, and it demanded a lot from my body. It did not smell like seashells. It did not slip gently into the pool. The third part of my life was an event, stretched across years. The third part of my life was not pressed successfully between the pages of a heavy book, except in the ways that it was. The third part of my life was made of bent birthday candles and felt like coffee grounds when chewed. It changed colors in water, and would fall over if set on a desk or table. I could sing about it. It could be fired from a gun or a job. It gasps when surfacing, and in the winters it shrinks down to the size of a single pin, heated to glow. The first part of my life briefly turned into a fourth part of my life before it became the third part of my life. This was the time when I knew you, or thought I knew you. This was the time when you knew me, I’m pretty sure you knew me as I was in the fourth part of my life, which was an entire arm as I had wished to be in the first part of my life. The gap between how I wished to be in the first part of my life and how I was in the fourth part of my life is shaped like you, or what I thought I knew when I thought I knew you. This all felt like medicine, but tasted like the perseids. So much of us were awash in the perseids. I did not know that I wanted to be awash in the perseids until you showed me what it was like to be awash in the perseids and then I very much longed to be awash in the perseids and suddenly I found myself awash in the perseids. Thank you. The third and fourth parts of my life were not a graveyard of anything. The fourth part of my life held its breath with anticipation and the third part of my life exhaled thick smoke with a bellow, a cough, a breath weapon. I never wanted to be a breath weapon until I was partially a breath weapon. I stopped wanting to be a breath weapon when I saw the dead lying in front of me killed, dressed up like enemies, but with simple organs, still moving inside their bodies like hurt earthworms. In the second part of my life my body is a pet, and in the third part of my life it was a hunting knife and in the fourth part of my life it was a pen knife I used to carve a shape in a tree that looked like you or what I thought I knew of you. It is possible that what I thought I knew of you was you or is you, but only you can tell me if what I thought I knew of you was you or is you. Here are some things to help you decide: I thought you were awash in the perseids like I was awash in the perseids. I thought your body was a pen knife like my body was a pen knife, even though you told me over and over that I was wrong about that. I might have been wrong about your body being a pen knife. I didn’t think you were a bank teller and I still don’t think you’re a bank teller, but you might be a different kind of teller. At that time I smelled like seashells. I may or may not have slipped gently into the pool. The fourth part of my life did not fall over if set on a desk or a table and I cannot sing about it. The birthday candles it was made out of were not bent, and it changed colors in water, though the colors were different colors than the colors were in the third part of my life. I did not have a breath weapon, but I thought my body was a pen knife. I don’t know what part of my life the second part of my life is a graveyard of, but I think it is a graveyard of another part of my life. There is no part of my life when I was gardening. There is no time for a bath or a shower. I turn 38 I turn 39 I turn 40 but I don’t know what I am turning 40 of. Maybe seashells. I’ll do more research on this and let you know what I am turning 40 of. Okay I’m back. It seems that turning 40 mostly involves your friends and family filling a room with graveyards that you can light on fire or release to God. They don’t say what you are turning 40 of. I don’t think it is seashells. I am not gardening. I could be fired from a gun or a job. The second part of my life is a graveyard that I put in my mouth and light on fire so that I can release it to God. In the first part of my life I said that poetry was like being alone on the moon with all your friends, but in the second part of my life poetry is like being alone on the moon with what I think my friends are like. It is like being fired from a gun or a job to be released to God, who is alone on the moon, gardening. Doubt and mystery hold hands. They drink from the same glass. They are awash in the perseids. In the second part of my life, there is such inertia and void as never before. It does not slip gently into the pool, just sits outside the walls, smelling the chlorine pushed from the vent, gently remembering. You could push through it with your fingers, but don’t. I could push through it with my fingers, but don’t. My body is no longer a pen knife or a breath weapon. It does not come when called. Does not slip gently, is not awash, there is no time for a bath or a shower. In the second part of my life I do things. In the first part of my life I did not. I refuse to be alone on the moon with all my friends, or released to God, who has none. The moon is a graveyard with no pool, no birthday candles, bent or otherwise. It is inertia and void, an entire arm. In the fifth part of my life I will go away for winters, heated to glow. Mini-interview with Never Angeline North HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? NAN: There are a lot of moments of reading that shaped me as a writer: reading Kafka and Beckett for the first time in high school AP English, reading Douglas Adams for the first time on the school bus in middle school, reading Renee Gladman for the first time in my ex’s garden-level apartment in Wicker Park, Chicago. That said, I think the time that’s probably affected me most directly was this: one time Mathais Svalina wrote “you should always make sure a poem outgrows its initial concept.” I don’t remember where he wrote that, but I was a fairly new writer when I read it, and I never went to school for writing so I didn’t get instruction often. When I read it, it just blew my mind. My poems got a lot better very quickly after that. It doesn’t always apply to every poem, of course, but at that moment it was exactly what I needed to hear. HFR: What are you reading? NAN: It’s been a season of re-reads. Lately I’ve been grabbing a poetry (or adjacent) book off of my shelf to accompany each morning, which has been fun because I haven’t read many of these in years. Recent grabs include The Activist by Renee Gladman, Half of What They Carried Flew Away by Andrea Rexilius, Frank O’Hara’s collected, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (not poetry, but definitely poetic), and The Blood Barn by Carrie Lorig. I’ve also been reading a nonfiction book of old musicians’ stories collected by this writer Colin Escott called Tattooed on Their Tongues: A Journey Through the Backrooms of American Music. I’m a sucker for old pop, jazz, and country music (and really any genre with a lot of lore to dig into), though I tend to have a love-hate relationship with music writing in general. So far this one is very good. I like how he takes the time to hunt down and interview these artists who maybe had one hit in 1963 but never really made it to the big time. HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Glow”? NAN: “Glow” is a lot more personal than the work I usually put out into the world. Or rather, it wears its personal nature a bit differently. Rather than hiding behind characters and narrative dream logic, the speaker in this poem is more or less me. In Umberto Eco’s essay about writing Name of the Rose, he talks about how writing can be embarrassing, comparing it to feeling like Snoopy banging away at his typewriter. His solution was to make up his own Snoopy to say the words for him. I think if there’s any Snoopy at all here it’s a Snoopy of image, rhythm, and variation instead of character like I’m accustomed to. A Snoopic pattern. On the most general level “Glow” is about a feeling I have dealt with where depression and getting older sort of team up to tell me that there was another part of my life when things were better, when I was better, less broken. There’s this constant backward-focus that I don’t think I had quite as much when I was younger. I had written the first two lines of “Glow” in a journal and thought maybe I’d use that as a jumping-off point, write it all out in longhand and reflect on these feelings using imagery and language as tools to really show my work by writing it all out in this way that somehow feels more specific and accurate than if I were to try to write about it literally. Then I could look back over it all: Were things really better before I was “broken”? I frequently write personal things that aren’t worth showing to anyone but my therapist. This one felt pretty different, and I thought it would be worth trying to publish. As far as style here, there have been only a few times I’ve allowed myself to really lean on repetition and variation like this, but I enjoy writing this way so much that I’d really like to develop it as a style even more in the future. It feels playful, which helps keep things from getting too dark or heavy, it mirrors my own natural looping thought patterns, and it’s fun to read aloud. HFR: What’s next? What are you working on? NAN: I have a hybrid-genre book coming out from Inside the Castle in 2025 called I lived a life as a cloud that followed overhead. The book is about a woman named Sara and her dog who live in a dreamy/trippy fantasy world. I wrote a tiny book about her called Sara or the Existence of Fire back in 2014, and I lived a life as a cloud is that book rewritten and expanded to be about three times as long. It’s a totally different animal than the old one and I’m excited for people to see it. This is my first time going back and collaborating with my past self like this and it was fun to get to live with Sara and her dog again for a while. As for wholly new material, I’ve got about three half-finished manuscripts right now that are wildly different from each other: one is poetry, one is fiction, and one is a sort of hybrid-genre play? “Glow” is one of the new pieces I’ve been writing for a the first of those—a collection of standalone poems currently titled Black Hole Science Is Filled with Apologies. That manuscript was originally a chapbook I made out of a bunch of pieces that I’d written over the years that hadn’t ended up in any books yet. But as I looked at it I realized that I wanted to write more for it, make it something a bit more substantial. As for the other two manuscripts, they feel a bit too under-developed to talk about publicly quite yet, but they’re slowly coming along. HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share? NAN: All my fiestiness seems to have left me this morning, so apologies for being extremely mild here, but I want to share that I am extremely glad Heavy Feather Review is still around. According to Submittable, I first submitted poems to you back in February 2012. Way to keep going all these years! Never Angeline North is the author of six books, including Careful Mountain (CCM, 2016), Sea-Witch (Inside the Castle, 2020), Rainbear!!!!!!!!! (Apocalypse Party, 2022), and the forthcoming I lived a life as a cloud that followed overhead (Inside the Castle, 2025). She was featured in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, and her work has been published widely in magazines such as Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, and Dreginald. She lives in Olympia, Washington, with her girlfriend, her girlfriend’s boyfriend, and a eyeless dog. Find her at never.horse. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. 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—Franz Kafka, from his diaries
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