[{"id":258842,"date":"2026-09-22T08:59:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T12:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258842"},"modified":"2026-09-21T14:00:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T18:00:51","slug":"gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/22\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\/","title":{"rendered":"Gordon Parks: A Dark Mirror"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The exhibit Voices in the Mirror,<\/em> on display at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, features some of Gordon Parks\u2019s best-known photographs from the nearly seven decades of his creative career. Taking its name from Parks\u2019s 1990 memoir, one of four he published in his lifetime, Voices in the Mirror<\/em> is framed not just by the photographer\u2019s vision but by the reflections of the photographic subjects, their descendants, as well as artists and activists, each of whom shared how their encounter with Parks\u2019s camera shaped their lives afterward. Black Panther Party Communications Secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver, featured in the exhibit, revels in Parks\u2019s ability to capture the \u201cjoy in photography\u2014you isolate what\u2019s important.\u201d When Parks traveled to Algiers in 1970 to photograph Cleaver and her husband Eldridge for Parks\u2019s last major assignment for Life<\/em> magazine, the photographer found both a movement and a family in chaos. He described \u201cthe cluttered, temporary shelter of a black man in exile\u2014where bags stay packed and all precious things are portable.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Despite the turmoil of the movement and a home life in disarray, Parks managed to produce a glamorous image that has since become iconic: a sexy, unencumbered young Black couple, bolstered by their love for each other, their love for Huey P. Newton, and their love of the revolution. Voices in the Mirror<\/em> celebrates Parks\u2019s exquisite eye, his ability to train his camera to find what was most important to convey about the lives of his subjects\u2014dignity under often oppressive and dehumanizing conditions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet not all of Parks\u2019s photographic encounters resulted in triumphant transformation. Whether by nature of the conditions in which Parks found his subjects or the enormity of the structures that bound them, sometimes Parks\u2019s photographs did damage.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, his 1961 photographs of twelve-year-old Fl\u00e1vio da Silva and his family, residents of a Rio de Janeiro favela, which appeared in a Life<\/em> magazine issue devoted to fighting communism in Latin America (\u201cFreedom\u2019s Fearful Foe: Poverty,\u201d June 16, 1961). Flooded with sympathetic responses and numerous donations from readers, Parks and Life<\/em> personnel helped Fl\u00e1vio get medical treatment for life-threatening illnesses, helped relocate the boy and his family to better housing, and even helped institute infrastructural improvement in the favela (\u201cThe Compassion of Americans Brings a New Life for Fl\u00e1vio,\u201d Life<\/em>, July 21, 1961). Fl\u00e1vio spent two years in Denver, Colorado, receiving medical treatment and attending school. All of this attention and the attempts at acculturation \u201cgreatly complicated his [Fl\u00e1vio\u2019s] return to Brazil, and forever colored his life.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> For his part, Parks felt \u201cconfusion and guilt\u201d about the disruption he brought to Fl\u00e1vio\u2019s life. \u201cAs a photojournalist I have on occasion done stories that have seriously altered human lives. In hindsight, I sometimes wonder if it might not have been wiser to have left those lives untouched, to have let them grind out their time as fate intended.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parks struggled with his involvement in Fl\u00e1vio\u2019s life for years to come and became increasingly mindful of the unpredictable power of his camera. Parks expressed similar concern following his essay, \u201cA Harlem Family,\u201d featuring the Fontanelles, an impoverished Black family barely surviving in a Harlem tenement in the years when the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power. Parks made the images in the cold, damp late autumn of 1967, \u201cA Harlem Family\u201d was published in the March 8, 1968, issue of Life<\/em> magazine, in a section titled \u201cThe Cycle of Despair: The Negro and the City,\u201d a special section devoted to understanding the spate of urban uprisings through sympathetic portraits. Parks connected with the Fontanelles through Neighborhood Board #4, a local agency for one of the Great Society antipoverty programs.4<\/a><\/sup> Given a list of families who might allow the photographer to chronicle the intimate details of their struggles, Parks began by interviewing Black families on Neighborhood Board #4\u2019s welfare rolls. He found that most were \u201ctoo embarrassed\u201d about the abject conditions in which they lived. Or perhaps they declined his invitation out of a desire to maintain some semblance of privacy these programs had already eroded in the name of \u201corder\u201d and \u201cintegration.\u201d In the end, only the Fontenelles agreed to participate, urged on by wife and mother Bessie Fontenelle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parks described Bessie, age thirty-nine, as \u201cstrong, personable, and caring\u201d and, more than that, \u201cshe understood the importance of exposing the misfortunes of the impoverished.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> Not only would their material misfortunes be exposed, but so too would the intimate details of their family: Bessie\u2019s strained relationship with her husband, Norman Fontenelle Sr. (age thirty-eight), who had been out of work for eight months and drank heavily; the frustrations and waywardness of their eight children (Phillip, fifteen; Roseanna, fourteen; Norman Jr., thirteen; Riel, twelve; Lette, nine; Kenneth, eight; Ellen, five; and Richard, three); the disappointments of Bessie\u2019s children from a previous marriage, twenty-year-old Harry, incarcerated in a state psychiatric hospital for drug addiction, and Bessie\u2019s oldest, Diana, living on her own in Massachusetts. To invite Parks into their fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Eighth Avenue (now Frederick Douglass Boulevard) and allow him to observe their lives for a month, for an article to be published in an internationally recognized magazine with a predominantly white middle-class readership, was a risky prospect with an uncertain outcome. Yet Bessie Fontenelle bravely gambled and smiled as she said, \u201cOkay, Mr. Parks, looks like you\u2019re going to be part of our home for a while.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In November 1967, when he began working with the Fontenelle family, Parks had been making images for Life<\/em> magazine for almost twenty years, starting in 1948 as a freelancer and then, after 1949, as the magazine\u2019s first Black staff photographer. Parks had traveled the world training his camera on the most beautiful and the most terrible of the human experience. His assignments often \u201cproved to be as different as silk and iron. Once, crime and fashion were served to me on the same day. The color of a Dior gown I photographed one afternoon turned out to be the same color as the blood of a murdered gang member I had photographed earlier that morning up in Harlem.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even across the vast and sometimes jarring range of genres, Parks developed artistic techniques and visual grammars that produced photographs full of drama and emotion. For the sociological assignments for which Life<\/em> relied on his sensitivity and expertise, Parks found modes of address that attempted to treat subjects and viewers with equal respect. But facing the extreme situation of the Fontenelles, which he would have to make legible for Life<\/em>\u2019s twenty million readers, Parks questioned his ability to do justice to this story. \u201cWas I about to exploit their despair?\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> How did Parks navigate the winds of these multiple demands?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world-famous photographer began this assignment without his camera, \u201csomething that would have been questionable to my colleagues.\u201d More than a gesture to gain the Fontenelles\u2019 trust, it let Parks examine his own ethical choices because, as he reflected later, \u201cI questioned my motives for the assignment.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> Parks recognized the historically extractive and exploitative work of sociological photography, and from his own experience with Fl\u00e1vio in Brazil earlier in the decade, he knew all too well that the camera can present crises but is limited in its ability to prevent or eradicate them. Thus, Parks first left his cameras at home. Then, when he did bring them, along with a turkey for the Fontenelles\u2019 Sunday dinner, the cameras mostly stayed in his jacket pocket; occasionally he would bring one out to show the children. He approached the assignment offering his presence\u2014his listening ear, sometimes food, but \u201cnot much. I don\u2019t want to start something I can\u2019t keep up\u201d\u2014before he lifted the viewfinder to his eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building rapport helped Parks understand how he would make the Fontenelles the protagonists of the story. As became his practice, he organized his reports around individuals, grounding \u201cthe interlocking problems of race and poverty in America\u201d in the lived experiences of everyday people.10<\/a><\/sup> Parks first developed this strategy as a Rosenwald Fund Fellow, working in the Farm Security Administration\u2019s (FSA) famed photography bureau under the mentorship of Roy Stryker. With his first photo essay, later named \u201cAmerican Gothic\u201d (1942), Parks found in Ella Watson, a Black cleaning woman who worked the night shift in the FSA offices, a striking symbol of Black women\u2019s labor as the foundation of American wealth and power. Through conversation and collaboration with Watson, Parks was able to elaborate on the fullness of her life as a mother, grandmother, and pillar of her spiritual community. \u201cAmerican Gothic\u201d demonstrates a life shaped but not wholly confined by the workings of American racial capitalism. Like Ella Watson, Red Jackson (in \u201cHarlem Gang Leader,\u201d 1948), Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton Sr. (in \u201cThe Restraints: Open and Hidden,\u201d 1956), and Fl\u00e1vio da Silva (in \u201cFreedom\u2019s Fearful Foe: Poverty: A Beaten Family in Rio Slum,\u201d 1961) would emerge as flesh-and-blood protagonists in Parks\u2019s reports, revealing the force of structural violence on everyday lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once he began photographing, Parks pursued a similar strategy with \u201cA Harlem Family.\u201d His goal was to present the story through the eyes of his subjects. Parks announces this intention immediately with the opening image of the photo essay: a close, tight portrait of Norman Sr., who looks directly at the camera through a broken window, his eyes wet as if on the verge of tears. The photograph covers a half page and reaches across the fold, so that readers must meet Norman\u2019s eyes as soon as they open to the spread. A poetic plea directly to the Life<\/em> audience, penned by Parks, echoes the direct gaze of the photograph and quickens the message that Norman and the reader are bound to each other as humans but confront one another across the fracturing conditions of race and class. \u201cFor I am you,\u201d the poem declares, \u201cstaring back from a mirror of poverty and despair, of revolt and freedom.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA Harlem Family\u201d was unsparing in its documentation of urban poverty and unflinching in its portrayal of the Fontenelles. In twenty-six photographs and some 2,600 words across sixteen pages, Parks brings Life<\/em>\u2019s readers uncomfortably but necessarily close to the Fontenelles\u2019 daily struggles. He documents both the tender and the cruel intimacies of their lives and offers them up for public consumption, attempting to afford the family dignity while driving home the loathsomeness of their situation. The story ends on an even darker note than how the essay began. A photograph that occupies most of one page and protrudes into the next shows Norman Sr. in a hospital bed, covered in burns after Bessie threw a pot of boiling sugar-and-honey water on him to ward off his alcohol-fueled attacks the night before. Parks positioned his camera over Norman Jr.\u2019s shoulder so that viewers could take in the disturbing view of the father\u2019s painfully blistered face and hands right alongside his shocked thirteen-year-old son. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite his various visual practices and ethical strategies, Parks never stopped worrying that he was exploiting the Fontenelles. He found the intensity of their situation almost unbearable. \u201cTerrifying,\u201d \u201csorrowful,\u201d \u201cgloom,\u201d \u201cmisery\u201d often appear in Parks\u2019s diary notes for the month he spent on this assignment. His position as a Black man in America who had experienced poverty himself made him ideal for such an assignment, but caught \u201cbetween life in Black ghettos, and life in Henry Luce\u2019s privileged [publishing] empire,\u201d Parks found it increasingly difficult to move between these two worlds. \u201cIt\u2019s like going from hell to heaven. The family faces a world of gloom, hunger and a thousand little violences every day.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup> The \u201cHarlem Family\u201d assignment made Parks acutely aware of how far he had come from his own experiences of abject poverty, just as it made him profoundly unhopeful that he could change the Fontenelles\u2019 lives for the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Parks felt anguish during the assignment, he was bolstered by the response from Life<\/em> readers. Letters soon poured in from all over the country, as they had after the article about Fl\u00e1vio da Silva and his family in the first half of the decade. They praised Parks\u2019s poignant profile of the Fontenelles and lamented that one family had experienced so much tragedy. Overwhelmingly, they asked, \u201cWhat, in the name of God, can I do to help?\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> Readers offered the Fontenelles food to fill their cupboards, sheets for their naked beds, jobs to get Norman Sr. back on track, better accommodations to make a real home, and cash to ease their deprivation. Some readers even offered to adopt the younger children to provide more stable lives with greater opportunity. \u201cLife<\/em>\u2019s readers had gotten the message\u201d that Parks had carefully assembled, and support for the Fontenelles included numerous donations. At his request, the magazine matched reader donations and bought a house for the family on Long Island. Parks and Life<\/em> readers hoped that the purchase of a suburban home for the destitute Fontenelles would help them forget the immediate horrors of their Harlem tenement\u2014the broken windows, the peeling paint, the toxic asbestos, the neglectful landlord who kept his distance, the vermin that stayed all too close, the lack of space, the lack of heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parks no doubt felt some semblance of relief that this family would enjoy the comforts a middle-class life in the suburbs offered: \u201cNew clothes, new furniture, a front porch, and fresh air.\u201d The children would have access to better-funded schools. Life<\/em> even helped secure a job for the long-unemployed Norman Sr.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat happened then,\u201d Parks would write and recount many many times for the remainder of his life, \u201changs brutally in my memory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Sr. had come home late from a night of heavy drinking with a friend to celebrate his new job, and fell asleep on the couch with a lit cigarette that quickly set the house on fire. Bessie got most of the family to safety besides Norman Sr. and eight-year-old Kenneth. Bessie was bereft. Even though she owned the house in Long Island and could probably have received financial support to rebuild, her dream was finished. Wearily, Bessie told Parks, \u201cTake us back to Harlem.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years after the tragedy in Long Island, Parks visited Bessie on Christmas Eve at her new apartment back in Harlem. She updated him on the state of her family: Norman Jr. and Harry were both in prison; Roseanna, Riel, and Lette were \u201con the streets\u201d and out of communication with their mother. Parks maintained contact with members of the family for the next few decades through correspondence, visits, and attendance at funerals. He mourned as they variously succumbed to chronic illness, addiction, incarceration, and death. Finding it \u201cimpossibl[e] to detach\u201d himself from the family, Parks understood himself as permanently \u201cpart of the Fontanelles.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup> The misfortunes of their lives were not his doing, yet Parks remained haunted by his collaboration with them. Since their first meeting, he was uncertain about the ethics of taking on this assignment. Once he began, Parks harbored a sense of guilt for all that had befallen the Fontenelles, especially for urging the purchase of a home that took even more from a family that had little to begin with. \u201cAs I fled that place,\u201d Parks wrote of the Christmas Eve visit, \u201cI sensed that perhaps I had played God and dug too deeply into their lives.\u201d15<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parks often referred to his camera as a weapon, which he wielded \u201cagainst all the things I disliked about America\u2014poverty, racism, discrimination.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> But in the context of \u201cA Harlem Family,\u201d we must ask: If the camera is a weapon against<\/em>, what is the camera for<\/em>? What, or more urgently, who are the casualties of such a disposition? \u201cA Harlem Family\u201d presented to white audiences an urgent statement about the damages of racialized poverty, but the story nearly devoured the Fontenelles whole. What if the camera does not always need to be ammunition but can act as a shield or provide safe harbor? Can the camera function as an object of care? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voices in the Mirror<\/em> showcases the many forms care took in Parks\u2019s ethical and aesthetic approach to his work: listening, collaboration, respect, camaraderie if not comradeship, and in many cases direct financial support; he even paid for Roseanna\u2019s, Ellen\u2019s, and Bessie Fontanelle\u2019s funeral services. Yet in the case of the Fontanelles, Parks\u2019s camera made promises it could not keep, a breach the artist would mourn the rest of his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lead Image Credit: Gordon Parks; “Norman Fontenelle, Sr., Harlem, New York, 1967” (gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches); (GP67.007) \u00a9 The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

  1. Gordon Parks, \u201cEldridge Cleaver in Algiers, a visit with Papa Rage,\u201d LIFE<\/em>, February 6, 1970, Vol. 68, No. 4, 20; and Gordon Parks Foundation, \u201cTribute to Kathleen Cleaver,\u201d May 2016, https:\/\/www.gordonparksfoundation.org\/education\/features\/tribute-to-kathleen-cleaver. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. See Paul Roth, \u201cWeapon of Choice,\u201d in Ariella A\u00efsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography<\/em> (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2024), 85. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. See Paul Roth and Amanda Maddox, Gordon Parks:<\/em> The Fl\u00e1vio Story<\/em> (G\u00f6ttingen, Germany: Steidl; Toronto: Ryerson Image Centre; Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum; Pleasantville, NY: The Gordon Parks Foundation, 2017), 100\u2013101, 124 (quoting from Parks\u2019s 1978 book Flavio<\/em>, 7). \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. See Robert L. Haggins, Director, Neighborhood Board #4, to Gordon Parks, March 11, 1968. Gordon Parks Papers, Wichita State University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, MS 2013-01, Box 1, Folder 29. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  5. Gordon Parks, A Hungry Heart: A Memoir<\/em> (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005), 258
    \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  6. Bessie Fontenelle quoted in Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 258. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  7. Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 341. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  8. Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 259. On Life<\/em> readership, see Wendy Kozol, \u201cGazing at Race in the Pages of Life<\/em>: Picturing Segregation through Theory and History,\u201d in Looking at<\/em> Life Magazine<\/em>, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001).
    \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  9. Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 259. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  10. \u201cThe Cycle of Despair,\u201d introduction, 47. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  11. Gordon Parks, \u201cA Harlem Family,\u201d Life<\/em>, March 8, 1968, 48. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  12. Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 216, 262. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  13. Letters to the Editor, Life<\/em>, March 29, 1968, 23, quoted in Doss, \u201cVisualizing Black America,\u201d 236. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  14. Parks quoted in Michael Torosian, Harlem: Gordon Parks The Artist\u2019s Annotations on a City Revisited in Two Classic Photographic Essays<\/em> (Toronto: Lumiere, 1997), 45. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  15. Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 268. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  16. Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons<\/em>, (1966; Minneapolis: Minneapolis Historical Society Press, 2010). \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The world-famous photographer began this assignment without his camera.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"Gordon Parks, \u201cEldridge Cleaver in Algiers, a visit with Papa Rage,\u201d LIFE<\/em>, February 6, 1970, Vol. 68, No. 4, 20; and Gordon Parks Foundation, \u201cTribute to Kathleen Cleaver,\u201d May 2016, https:\/\/www.gordonparksfoundation.org\/education\/features\/tribute-to-kathleen-cleaver.\",\"id\":\"fn-4b0cc634-8199-40f3-b87a-3cc0cc9890a3\"},{\"content\":\"See Paul Roth, \u201cWeapon of Choice,\u201d in Ariella A\u00efsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography<\/em> (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2024), 85.\",\"id\":\"fn-ba5da911-2243-431f-b41d-865cb80970c1\"},{\"content\":\"See Paul Roth and Amanda Maddox, Gordon Parks:<\/em> The Fl\u00e1vio Story<\/em> (G\u00f6ttingen, Germany: Steidl; Toronto: Ryerson Image Centre; Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum; Pleasantville, NY: The Gordon Parks Foundation, 2017), 100\u2013101, 124 (quoting from Parks\u2019s 1978 book Flavio<\/em>, 7).\",\"id\":\"fn-6fef9cf6-d1b6-41dc-aee9-dde3fd0e3992\"},{\"content\":\"See Robert L. Haggins, Director, Neighborhood Board #4, to Gordon Parks, March 11, 1968. Gordon Parks Papers, Wichita State University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, MS 2013-01, Box 1, Folder 29.\",\"id\":\"fn-3777f7e6-0e25-4ca8-b8f1-41ec6a57be08\"},{\"content\":\"Gordon Parks, A Hungry Heart: A Memoir<\/em> (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005), 258
    \",\"id\":\"fn-7539b42f-7da3-4709-bc92-a14bbe42b4dc\"},{\"content\":\"Bessie Fontenelle quoted in Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 258.\",\"id\":\"fn-4d5240bd-9a4a-4c02-b35e-fa470f6b1c31\"},{\"content\":\"Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 341.\",\"id\":\"fn-4afe7300-13d6-47e0-9057-eca74e3f3f6b\"},{\"content\":\"Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 259. On Life<\/em> readership, see Wendy Kozol, \u201cGazing at Race in the Pages of Life<\/em>: Picturing Segregation through Theory and History,\u201d in Looking at<\/em> Life Magazine<\/em>, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001).
    \",\"id\":\"fn-83189a95-5699-47d6-ad40-34ffe9cff0f5\"},{\"content\":\"Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 259.\",\"id\":\"fn-a681466f-b0d3-46ae-8f71-906d66023e77\"},{\"content\":\"\u201cThe Cycle of Despair,\u201d introduction, 47.\",\"id\":\"fn-7595d094-845a-4983-bf07-fe9ea099bc92\"},{\"content\":\"Gordon Parks, \u201cA Harlem Family,\u201d Life<\/em>, March 8, 1968, 48.\",\"id\":\"fn-a906ce66-e2ac-42ce-9e63-91a7f2dd8dcb\"},{\"content\":\"Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 216, 262.\",\"id\":\"fn-6dc3c927-fe33-4869-9e25-15f9eff1f69f\"},{\"content\":\"Letters to the Editor, Life<\/em>, March 29, 1968, 23, quoted in Doss, \u201cVisualizing Black America,\u201d 236.\",\"id\":\"fn-3de6d1f7-954a-4667-81cd-3a1497658823\"},{\"content\":\"Parks quoted in Michael Torosian, Harlem: Gordon Parks The Artist\u2019s Annotations on a City Revisited in Two Classic Photographic Essays<\/em> (Toronto: Lumiere, 1997), 45.\",\"id\":\"fn-04b8c2c7-4ce5-4c43-af8c-e3fbbe9c785f\"},{\"content\":\"Parks, A Hungry Heart<\/em>, 268.\",\"id\":\"fn-ec035083-bc69-430a-81b4-9a13e586c17b\"},{\"content\":\"Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons<\/em>, (1966; Minneapolis: Minneapolis Historical Society Press, 2010).\",\"id\":\"fn-1e8d5b4d-55b4-40a6-842e-0e79c5286c17\"}]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":"{\"authors\":[88918],\"author_categories\":{\"88918\":\"1\"},\"fallback_author_user\":\"140487\",\"ppma_author_box_select\":\"\",\"selected_authors\":[{\"id\":88918,\"display_name\":\"Leigh Raiford\",\"is_guest\":1,\"category_id\":\"1\"}]}"},"categories":[88701],"tags":[9416],"ppma_author":[88918],"class_list":["post-258842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGordon Parks: A Dark Mirror - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The world-famous photographer began this assignment without his camera.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/22\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gordon Parks: A Dark Mirror - The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The world-famous photographer began this assignment without his camera.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/22\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-22T12:59:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/52.004-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1721\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Leigh Raiford\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Juliana Luna\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"14 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/22\\\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/22\\\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Juliana Luna\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4\"},\"headline\":\"Gordon Parks: A Dark Mirror\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-22T12:59:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/22\\\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":2811,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/22\\\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/52.004-scaled.jpg?wsr\",\"keywords\":[\"culture\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/22\\\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/22\\\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/22\\\/gordon-parks-a-dark-mirror\\\/\",\"name\":\"Gordon Parks: A Dark Mirror - 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Parts of this essay are excerpted from the forthcoming <em>A HARLEM FAMILY 1967\/1968<\/em> (GPF\/Steidl)<\/span><\/p>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/52.004-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258842"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258863,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258842\/revisions\/258863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258842"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258843,"date":"2026-09-21T13:01:53","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T17:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258843"},"modified":"2026-09-21T13:09:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T17:09:23","slug":"i-am-having-a-breakdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/i-am-having-a-breakdown\/","title":{"rendered":"I Am Having a Breakdown"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"> Dear Monica,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I just read your response after being VERY EXCITED TO GO ALL IN on this topic last week, and I have to admit I\u2019m so exhausted by my life right now that even <em>the idea<\/em> of spending one more iota acknowledging men, the desire we have for them, and whether that desire is being determined internally or externally makes me want to curl up in a ball and sleep for ten years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While I hate to change the subject because you called me out in a really important way and I <em>mainly<\/em> agree with you, I\u2019m gonna do that thing fighters do when they are too tired to do anything other than lie down in the ring and hit the mat with an open palm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I know you know how hard it is to support a family financially, emotionally, and transportationally. This week, I truly cannot write about anything other than how overwhelmed I am, which I do not typically write about because my greatest fear in life is coming off as a whiny little bitch. Because I feel that complaining is a waste of energy and venting is for people who are inexperienced at being vented at\u2014which is why they feel so shameless about venting. (It is always those with the LEAST to complain about that do the most complaining because having the time and energy to complain is its own kind of privilege.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I feel like things are piling up, instead of taking a breath and trying to take it <em>one thing at a time<\/em>, I become erratically obsessed with trying to carry everything in my hands at once in order to prove to myself that my capacity is big enough to handle it. <em>No, it\u2019s fine. I\u2019m totally fine.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have been like this my whole life. Once a year, the accumulation breaks me down to pieces and humbles the fuck out of me, and this past weekend was my breaking point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As you know, I was widowed eight years ago and have been raising four children on my own ever since. Professionally, this has meant hustling at all times to support my family on one income, which in this climate looks like seventeen freelance jobs. Personally, it has meant showing up for four children as TWO people instead of one. Being an only parent means representing both. It means parenting twice as hard to overcompensate. It means your kids feeling safe, seen, and held at all times, even if only with one arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is hard for me to explain this to other people. I am also aware that, in many ways, I have it easier than friends (you, for example) who have to co-parent in less than ideal circumstances. Still, I do not relate to most single mothers and feel frustrated when people try to relate to me. Like, bitch? You don\u2019t fucking know what it\u2019s like to carry an entire family on your back with zero fucking breaks. But it\u2019s more than just that. Knowing that my children\u2019s father never got the chance to see his children perform onstage as young adults or compete in sports as teenagers means that I cannot\u2014or will not\u2014miss a thing. When I have to choose, for example, between attending a game or a play or a film festival, rooting one child on instead of another, I feel bereft. I hate knowing that one of my children cannot look to the stands and see me there cheering them on. It fucking breaks me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This has meant attending every performance and every game\u2026 setting an impossible standard for myself and my children. While my oldest is basically living on his own now, finishing his senior year of college in DC and supporting himself financially, two of my three daughters (one a competitive athlete, another applying to conservatories while simultaneously shooting student films seemingly every weekend all over Los Angeles) have become so incredibly high maintenance in terms of personal and professional stakes, I feel like their very futures hang in the balance of what I can and cannot commit to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I always tell my kids, \u201cIf you go all in, I will, too,\u201d and well, I ended up with two of the most ambitious teenage daughters imaginable. Daughters who, in a two-parent household, would already be impossible to manage schedule-wise. Daughters who\u2014with a mother who had more time and money to invest in their passions\u2014would have likely already met their goals. But because it\u2019s just me\u2026 I have had to say no to things most of their friends\u2019 parents have been able to say yes to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Beyond that, there is no margin of error or time for illness, which means if I slow down, the entire schedule\u2014which is a well-oiled machine at this point\u2014implodes. So any time someone is like, \u201cGirl, you need to rest,\u201d I want to slap them across the face because I can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">SO MANY OF US FUCKING CAN\u2019T.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A couple months ago, when I came down with the diarrhea lettuce disease from hell, I made a diaper out of maxi pads and powered through so my daughter could be on time for her volleyball training an hour away. This has been my life for eight years. When I have the flu, I still wake up at 6:00 am so I can get everyone to school on time. When I\u2019m grieving the loss of someone I love, I\u2019m still rooting my daughter on from the sidelines, behind sunglasses, maybe, mascara-streaked and crazy-looking, but I\u2019m still there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thankfully, one of my kids is comparatively low maintenance. In what little time I have left lately, I spend it with her because if I\u2019m not with one of her sisters I\u2019m with the other, and the extreme guilt I feel leaving one of my girls alone for a two-day tournament every other weekend keeps me up at night when I really need those six hours of sleep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then there\u2019s work. I haven\u2019t had time to write on my Substack, which means I\u2019m losing paid subscribers, which means I am like, \u201cOh fuck, I better write something GREAT and SOON.\u201d But my weekends\u2014which I used to reserve for catching up with my writing (weekdays are slammed with freelance work)\u2014are now spent in gymnasiums with hundreds of volleyball players. And while I have certainly attempted to work between games, having balls fly at my face and whistles sound every thirteen seconds does not make for a room of one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To note: I am currently writing this in my notes app on a bench in Marina Del Rey (waiting for my daughter to workshop her college audition monologues) where I have a one-hour window and about 45 minutes of daylight. We won\u2019t be home until 8:30 pm, and I still have to figure out dinner, and because I haven\u2019t had time to go to the store, I\u2019m gonna have to MacGyver something together. Rinse, wash, repeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of this to say, I wanted so desperately to give my daughters a magical fifteenth birthday (Brunch! New facial piercings! Thrifting in Silverlake!) this past Sunday, but instead slept through my alarm, got out of bed too fast, and threw out my back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I popped some Ibuprofen and rallied, but somewhere between getting pierced and going thrifting, I felt like I was going to pass out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cYou guys? I think I need to go lie down\u2026\u201d By the time I got home, I was hyperventilating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I know it\u2019s all my fault. My standards for myself are completely unattainable but I do not feel that I can lower them. Because I see what resulted from this bone-tired exhaustion, I know it\u2019s worth it to strip myself bare to provide for them. But I am also so, so tired, dude. I am cry-writing this because I don\u2019t know how to keep going. I have become so accustomed to doing it all on my own that asking for help feels like a gateway drug to getting in my car and driving to Mexico never to be seen or heard from again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I guess, to circle back to last week\u2019s \u201cGirl on Girl,\u201d this is why I get so fucking angry at men who exploit women\u2019s capacity to love, to parent, to drive the extra miles they say they <em>can\u2019t<\/em>. Some of us ACTUALLY can\u2019t and somehow find a way to do it anyway. SO MANY OF US <em>actually can\u2019t<\/em> and do it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some of us are the walking dead right now, typing with bones against keys, foreheads against steering wheels at stoplights, smoking cigs as a reminder to exhale. Some of us have no fight left yet we still get up off the mat and willingly climb into the next ring knowing we will be pummeled again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And, while I hate to admit it, because saying it aloud (or on paper) feels like one long-winded bitch-fest (ugh, gross!), this week <strong><\/strong>that \u201csome of us\u201d is me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Xo,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rebecca<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is no margin of error or time for illness, which means if I slow down, the entire schedule\u2014which is a well-oiled machine at this point\u2014implodes. So any time someone is like, \u201cGirl, you need to rest,\u201d I want to slap them across the face because I can\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139812,"featured_media":258844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":"{\"authors\":[88759],\"author_categories\":{\"88759\":\"1\"},\"fallback_author_user\":\"139812\",\"ppma_author_box_select\":\"\",\"selected_authors\":[{\"id\":88759,\"display_name\":\"Rebecca Woolf\",\"is_guest\":1,\"category_id\":\"1\"}]}"},"categories":[88701],"tags":[9416],"ppma_author":[88759],"class_list":["post-258843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>I Am Having a Breakdown - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There is no margin of error or time for illness, which means if I slow down, the entire schedule\u2014which is a well-oiled machine at this point\u2014implodes. 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She has written columns for Babble, Mom.me, and Romper and has been featured in New York Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, Refinery29, LitHub and more. She currently authors the column\u00a0<em>Sex & the Single Mom<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>the braid<\/em>\u00a0newsletter on substack and co-teaches The Living Gaze grief writer\u2019s workshop and The Bench Sessions, a private community for women contemplating divorce.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">She is the author of\u00a0<em>Rockabye: From Wild to Child<\/em>\u00a0(Seal Press, 2008) and the bestselling memoir,\u00a0<em>ALL OF THIS: a memoir of death and desire<\/em>\u00a0(Harper One, 2022) and when she isn\u2019t writing herself, works one-on-one with memoirists as a book coach.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">She is the mother of one adult son and three teenage daughters who she has proudly raised on her own for eight years.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">She lives in Los Angeles and appreciates a good vanity plate over almost anything else.<\/p>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/girl-on-girl-1.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139812"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258843"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258848,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258843\/revisions\/258848"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258843"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258783,"date":"2026-09-21T12:52:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258783"},"modified":"2026-09-21T12:52:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:52:20","slug":"major-taylor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/major-taylor\/","title":{"rendered":"Major 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class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1294\" src=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-1024x1294.jpg?wsr\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-258796\" srcset=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-1024x1294.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-350x442.jpg 350w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-800x1011.jpg 800w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-1215x1536.jpg 1215w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-1621x2048.jpg 1621w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-1320x1668.jpg 1320w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17-600x758.jpg 600w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR-17.jpg 1998w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 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Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/major-taylor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Major Taylor - The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/major-taylor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-21T16:52:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR.cover_-scaled.jpg?wsr\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2068\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Frederick Noland\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Laura June\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/21\\\/major-taylor\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/21\\\/major-taylor\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Laura June\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/8804da4cef13b67b2e6481a811275430\"},\"headline\":\"Major 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bookseller.","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/author\/laurajunetherumpus-net\/"}]}},"authors":[{"term_id":88913,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"frederick-noland","display_name":"Frederick Noland","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"<p><span data-sheets-root=\"1\">Frederick Noland lives in Oakland, California. His specialty is visual storytelling, whether in animation, comics or illustration. Noland\u2019s comics have appeared in the <em>New Yorker<\/em> and his illustrations have appeared in <em>SF Weekly<\/em>, <em>Nickelodeon<\/em>, <em>XboX Magazine<\/em>, and more. In the year 2000 he was awarded a Xeric Grant for his one-man anthology Shpilkes. He is the author of Major Taylor, a biographical comic about the first Black World Champion in road cycling, who became one of the first international sports stars. Noland is an avid but unremarkable cyclist.<br \/><\/span><\/p>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MAJORTAYLOR.cover_-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139812"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258798,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258783\/revisions\/258798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258783"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258147,"date":"2026-09-21T11:23:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T15:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258147"},"modified":"2026-09-21T14:11:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T18:11:09","slug":"two-poems-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/two-poems-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>GREEN IN DROUGHT<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">green the color of unpolished silverware, green the edge<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">around a bruise, green the longing of missing a place, green placed<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">between two thumbs to make the grass blade<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">whistle, green plucked<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">out of the teeth, dill green, cabbage green, green of worry on the cusp of breath\u2014green, did you breathe?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">green yellow, green blue, green sleep<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">trees hold in winter, green dreams I prune with sterilized clippers when stepping outside in an effort of waking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to waxy green of scrub oak suckling on fog, green against gray backdrop with<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">wisps gone falsely vibrant through green sunglasses, green bottle left after drinking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">on a table in the moonlight, green echo<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of an evening remembered at dawn, green the dank cellar, onions in the cold sprouting tiny green tips, green kiss<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">scallions leave on the lips, flavor enhancer, the foliage<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">taking over from beauty after blossoms have passed, green recollected in rain the color of saturated<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">cement, gray green, the coo<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of doves outside the window, once green, the view<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">in California in an \u201980s summer as long as<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the industry of ants collecting aphids I stood<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">in our dank cellar with its smell of onions where I was supposed to be a girl<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">looking for the clippers, but the grassy scent wrapped me in some kind of shawl<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">not heavy though my shoulders felt how it flowed wide as ten thousand animal breaths and thick as the touch receptors<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">on a mole\u2019s padded snout used to tunnel into the earth<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and I remember even now this classroom of damp<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">teaching me a different form<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of measure, units for how matter pools and fluxes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">into what we tend<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to label landscape, an undulation, a comforting bed, a yard where my mother was calling<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">for me to come back from that envelopment, but my name\u2014once four letters\u2014had stretched<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">into some other type<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of word, written in a script as permanent<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">as chlorophyll<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">what if the will to stand in the fray, to inhabit the frayages, as Spivak calls them, where limits and tensions reside, is a crying out<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">for release as gentle as lacy veins on a dried out leaf giving way and only then as the shape disintegrates<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">know how it was all connected<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">what if strength means to lose<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">one\u2019s boundaries a bit, out in public, under fluorescent lights in the conglomerated<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">mega store where the plants are dying for lack of care and the emerald saturation of a frond holding on\u2014this green could be so luscious\u2014catches you in the grip<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of twig, branch, trunk, hand<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to the bark, thumb dusting the delicate<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">veins of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">this one thought<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">unsightly, ragged, rough<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">at the edges, not worth the price, though you passively scan your card to pay, though your house has no more space, though your human children tease you for adopting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">yet another plant, what if<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was born into parched banks and lush loneliness,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">cypress canker, glacier melt, the hand that is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">gripping the tool in the gray slip of day through which the sunlight glides, this mouth that is not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">capable of forcing words to say exactly what it is to be aware, whether standing here on sandy soil is anything more than an accident<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of thirst and youth, and the failure of prophets to stop catastrophes from happening or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my own failure to recall the reality of color\u2014green shimmer of twisting fish\u2014and texture\u2014chipped lip of paint on metal\u2014to make a choice<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">from among the details, save what it is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">coming through the senses uninvited,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">what it is I\u2019m doing in the middle of the uncreated<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">country that\u2019s always been here, inside of me, land as companion<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019ve been living with for all these years, the forgotten self made visible<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">or the forgotten selves, string of green, this green in drought taking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">me so far east, it becomes west, and down is up<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">in a vibrancy born in me extending into the space<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of others, breathing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">nearby, since after all, we are each some<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of the other of the plum of the juice of the dribble of the sourness of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">skin that holds in sweetness, that rich distillation of the sky<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">we can bite right into, taste the sleeping<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">clouds, thunderstorm nestled in the whole bed<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of pulp, flesh, our tongues asking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">more of each other, for more, for<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">a torrent<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CONDUIT<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t know why the ocean pays out its pearly rubble<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">on this specific beach, hundreds and hundreds of sand dollars below our feet, repeating their breakage<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">like an endless string of calculations<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">working down to the answer<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of sand<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the contrast of black rock against surf, the multiplication of gull shit layered on the crags, a blue blanket draped across the shoulders<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of two who remain, turning their love<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">against the wind so it won\u2019t get chapped, so that in summation it seems<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the pearls of dead sand dollars strung along the shore are the most likely thing to treasure<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">before the tide takes them back from the dunes roped off from us humans<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to let the snowy plovers mate<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I watch my daughters run from dot to dot, packing their pockets, collecting chipped disks<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">we\u2019ll wash off, later, in the bathroom sink and leave to dry on a rag overnight, not realizing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">by morning the carcasses will be swarming with ants eating away at the remnants of flesh that still clings<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to the surface<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">under the circumstances and since I once lived there and because she is a mother, too, doesn\u2019t the woman in Texas deserve<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">deliberation, why she might want to take certain books off the shelves of the library,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">ban unsettling<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">passages that make desire explicit, set a flame<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to paper and ignite a burning<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">sensation inside the body the mother pretends not to notice, grooming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">her own image as she stands outside<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the library\u2019s front window, licking a finger to tame the fly-aways made evident in open air, illumined by big Texas sky and I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">catch the scent of polyvinyl hairspray<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and exhaust<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">see the river oak beyond, how it stands quiet and gorgeously twisted and not frostbitten or interrupted or struggling to recover yet<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">before the mother pushes through the door to join what I imagine<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">is a circle of red plastic chairs arranged for all the keepers<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of the faith, but on reflection, I have more faith in the oaks I have always loved, I have always loved<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">their dark arteries<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">undulating from the base as if trying to debate the ocean<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">or carry on a dialog with something remote and so vast and far away<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the trees have to fling themselves at it in order to catch what\u2019s invisible with their moss covered arms<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">not seeming at all bothered by erosion<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">or the spores of ferns bedding down in the roughness of bark, by its very nature layered<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">so when I lay down in its shade as a girl and splayed my arms and legs as wide as they could go<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I felt right and much sturdier than in public<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">throughout the day with the gaze<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of all the men looking at me<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">do you as well throughout the day keep thinking of the ocean and the waves, of the oaks and the way<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">our lies are pressurized<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">like aerosol spray, dispersed into the air<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">we breathe into our bodies and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">for all my walking through the dunes, what do I really know about untruths or unsettling or what is due to whom, though I used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live in Texas in a duplex where two highways intersected, where the Texians used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live with their German, Dutch, and Swedish accents, where the Mexicans used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live, deeming foreigners pirates and dealing with them as such, where the Spanish used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live in what they dubbed an interior province, where the French used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live, having misjudged where the Mississippi meets the sea, where the Karankawa used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live, waterproofing their baskets with viscous bitumen, where the Atakalpa used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live, though they called themselves the Ishak and went following the buffalo, where the Petaros used<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to live in the Pineywoods of eastern Texas, which is all we know, we know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">more about the woods we are trying to save than the people who once lived there<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and when you hike all the way to the end of the trail<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">your only hope of gaining any sense of scope over the wetland<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">is to climb the lookout tower and see<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">how pathways forget they are paths<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and grasses blur into the grass<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and yucca fans out like eyelashes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">opening from this vantage point to reveal the shapes the eye was hiding\u2014all the alligators<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you had no idea were submerged just a few feet away as you passed<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">on your journey to get here<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">5.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">under the circumstances and after her journey and because she speaks her second language now more beautifully than anyone born here, doesn\u2019t my friend deserve<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">awe at the way she wraps her English<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">sentences so effortlessly around the shoulders of the person across<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the table when she teaches her class on \u201cRestless Women\u201d to the inmates at the prison once a week<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">though of course they don\u2019t hug or clasp hands or do any of that stuff<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">with their bodies on account<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of the no-touch policy, so many of them become <em>real talkers<\/em> instead<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">that\u2019s what my friend says, though I\u2019ve never<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">been a talker, and I\u2019m still learning how to take a circuitous route with the hope that you\u2019ll follow, not get lost or wander off when I describe how<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">when my friend and I were walking along the bluff hunched into the gusts and somewhere in the twist of conversation her admission slid in, <em>you know<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>I have a lot of darkness in me<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it felt soft, like velvet or the fur or the underside of a still living<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">sand dollar, all the purple cilia waving in unison to move a microbe slowly toward the mouth<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to catch it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and her admitting it weighed the weight of something small and so obvious but forbidden, the closed off<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">hole we all hold in the center of our stomachs, black opal<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">echoing the universe inside it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">some famous male poet I barely knew once tried to steal from me, reaching out at a crowded reception<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to pat my stomach, caress it, history<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">a set of pre-existing conditions, so when my friend said, <em>I have a lot of darkness in me<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">her words became a conduit, a being<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">connected by the needles<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of wind knitting the fibers of our untied hair and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I still know very little about speaking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">language, which is public, other than it grows by loans and borrowings<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">from other families and is a whole mess of tangle and conquest linguists map, trying to represent it neatly as an oak tree and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I still know very little about ghost woodlands, saltwater intruding on the roots<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">stumps and stumps passing to grassland turning to marsh flooding to sea, and certainly<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I know nothing of massacres, the Ishak splitting in two and then disappearing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">so what\u2019s written of them is written from the perspective<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of an enemy settler, and I\u2019ve never met a girl who\u2019s sure<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of who she is in a world that wants to fondle her, which means I need my girls to read her story, find it at the library before the shelf breaks under the endless<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">weight of all the badly written picture books about pretty mermaids<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my daughters love, my daughters <em>love,<\/em> which means they replicate out of sand<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">whatever they\u2019ve been given and they\u2019re building now the mermaid\u2019s tail and they\u2019re dragging strands of kelp for hair washed up from the dying<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">forests under the sea, these twisted mounds of weeds buzzing with flies<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the girls don\u2019t seem to mind, though I\u2019m exhausted<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">by the rush of highway traffic that never stops<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">hushing us from outside our house, and tonight I\u2019ll tell them yet again at bedtime to pretend<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it\u2019s just the ocean, and the ocean is not rising, and they\u2019re simply lying on the beach<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">with the waves, the waves, the waves\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>green the color of unpolished silverware, green the edge<br \/>\naround a bruise, green the longing of missing a place, green placed<br \/>\nbetween two thumbs to make the grass blade whistle, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258463,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[10691],"tags":[667],"ppma_author":[88888],"class_list":["post-258147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Two Poems - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"green the color of unpolished silverware, green the edge around a bruise, green the longing of missing a place, green placed between two thumbs to make the grass blade whistle,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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Luna"},"url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/author\/jnluna\/"}]}},"authors":[{"term_id":88888,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"mira-rosenthal","display_name":"Mira Rosenthal","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"<b>Mira Rosenthal<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is the author of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Territorial<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award, and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Local World<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two Fulbright fellowships, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize and appears regularly in such journals as <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Poetry<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">,<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The New York Review of Books<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ploughshares<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Threepenny Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">the Times Literary Supplement<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guernica<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harvard Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">New England Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A Public Space<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oxford American<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. She is a professor of Creative Writing at Cal Poly and\u00a0 lives in a small town on the central coast of California with three humans, two cats, and many fruit-bearing trees.<\/span>\r\n\r\n "}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/CF044620_SZIMAGES_MROSENTHAL_2021_000034-Mira-Rosenthal-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258147"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258866,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258147\/revisions\/258866"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258147"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258482,"date":"2026-09-21T10:40:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T14:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258482"},"modified":"2026-09-21T12:01:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:01:27","slug":"is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Body Horror Skin Deep?: How “The Substance” ushered in a new era of anti-woman horror"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I rested my hand on my friend\u2019s back, ready at any moment to hold her hair, as she dry-heaved into the movie theater hedges. When we decided to see <em>The Substance<\/em> on its opening night, before the hype and the media hullabaloo, neither of us expected such a nauseating display. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I spent half the film watching Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley through my fingers, and likely the other half with my eyes covered entirely, audibly gagging during the 140-minute trainwreck that seemed to be unfolding in front of me in extra-slow motion. The 2024 film centers Moore as the beautiful yet aging Hollywood star Elisabeth, who takes a mysterious black-market drug to revert back to a younger version of herself after she is fired from her long-running television show on her 50<sup>th<\/sup> birthday. The titular substance, a single-use bright green liquid, splits Elisabeth into two entities, her regular ol\u2019 has-been self, and the new spritely starlet Sue (Qualley), who rips Elisabeth open from the inside and crawls out of her discarded body, plump as a baby and sexy as a Playboy. The two women are expected to \u201crespect the balance\u201d: Every week they must switch off consciousness in order to keep either body from deteriorating. But after obtaining overnight success as Elisabeth\u2019s replacement, Sue\u2019s bodily avarice festers uncontrollably, causing her to live far beyond her week-long means, all the while rapidly aging Elisabeth\u2019s body into that of a terrifying, decrepit hag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The film, by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, was nominated for and won several awards for its visual effects and makeup, and, at the expense of myself and my friend\u2019s weak stomachs, for very good reason. Every shot of <em>The Substance<\/em> is viscerally disgusting and incredibly violent. After Sue murders Elisabeth (who, to be fair, was also trying to murder Sue), she begins to rapidly decompose just hours before she is set to host a Dick van Dyke-style New Year\u2019s Eve broadcast. Her teeth wriggle out. Her nails break away from their beds. Her ears rot off the side of her head. But, when Sue tries to create an even younger, even more beautiful, even more perfect version of herself with the leftover serum, she mutates into a bullous monster with both her and Elisabeth\u2019s rictus faces stuck in perpetual scream on its body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not a single fleshy detail was left to the viewer\u2019s imagination, not even the film\u2019s repugnant end, when the monster totters onto the live broadcast\u2019s stage in a designer gown and a paper mask of Elisabeth\u2019s face, babbling unintelligibly until she is decapitated, then explodes. I could not get out of the movie house fast enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was born in the early aughts, the pinnacle of tabloid fat-shaming and \u201cnothing tastes as good as skinny feels\u201d mantras. I grew up in the bleach-blonde visual landscape of Scottsdale, Arizona, sometimes dubbed \u201cSilicone Valley.\u201d I hit puberty during the thin-spo era of Tumblr. Although my mother always modeled a good relationship with her body to me, my greatest fear as a child was growing up to be fat and ugly. I was never a \u201cpretty girl\u201d to the other kids my age and I was often ridiculed for being bigger, which, looking back, I never really was. In elementary school, with no understanding of human anatomy, I would dream of taking scissors and cutting off rolls from my stomach and legs. As I got older and developed curves, the fears only became worse when I realized all this wasn\u2019t just playground politics and these things \u201cmattered\u201d in the real world. By age eleven I was getting monthly facial waxes to put an end to the <em>Why do you have a mustache if you\u2019re a girl?<\/em> remarks. By the end of middle school, I was drinking five cups of green tea a day because I heard on Instagram that they helped you lose weight. I would have done unthinkable things for a blonde balayage. In high school, I would walk into doors and walls in unsuccessful attempts to break my nose (an excuse for a rhinoplasty); and I tried relentlessly to give myself anorexia (<em>just for a month<\/em>, I would think), but was far too undisciplined to succeed at it, which I hated myself for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I look back at this younger version of myself and do not feel contempt or pity for her. I feel the same ache I felt for Elisabeth and Sue in the car ride back from the theater: sorrow. As a white child living in a conservative suburb, I experienced only a fraction of what others did, but it was enough for me to fantasize about bodily harm before I even understood what the beauty standard was. I still sometimes do. The message is that these insecurities, instilled in so many women like me from the moment we can walk and talk, are punishable by violence, mutilation, and death, is yet another piece of propaganda that women bring suffering unto themselves, instead of a longstanding patriarchal structure that hoists it upon them without regard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019ve long gravitated toward reading body horror in literature, as many of the modern stories in the genre are written by women, about women. It\u2019s cathartic to read other women\u2019s accounts\u2014especially fictional accounts\u2014of the terror that existing in a female body begets. I did not expect <em>The Substance<\/em> to reach the heights it did: It took the culturati hostage, earned several Oscar nods, and was the revelatory sign that body horror was back and better than ever. Move over Cronenberg, we have a new version of mutated monsters. And guess what? This time, they\u2019re <em>feminist<\/em>. Or so we like to call them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Substance<\/em>\u2019s critical acclaim and box office frenzy was yet another clue that horror was beginning to be taken seriously by cinephiles, but also by the Academy. In the midst of the horrific reality we are entrenched in, it makes sense that horror is resonating with audiences more and more by the year. The genre has long been one of the most reliable forces to draw people to the theaters, and the industry is betting big on it to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/business\/media-telecom\/studios-bet-horror-films-reanimate-cinemas-2025-07-05\/\">reinvigorate the box office<\/a>. The low-budget slasher films of the New Hollywood era dominate the genre no more: Horror is mainstream and highbrow now. Only for those with thick skin <em>and<\/em> critical minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A slew of body horror movies succeeded <em>The Substance<\/em>\u2019s release, from blockbusters like Dave Franco and Alison Brie\u2019s <em>Together<\/em> (2025) to international indie films like <em>Saccharine<\/em> (2026), all with similarly graphic degenerations of the human body. While none generated the widespread hype of <em>The Substance<\/em>, their existence in its wake is a telling sign that modern cultural criticism is increasingly borne from the body, and meaningful, progressive messaging is more emphatic when it shocks rather than awes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After my friend stopped gagging into the bushes and we took our separate Ubers home, I pulled out my phone and rated <em>The Substance<\/em> half a star on Letterboxd. \u201cnightmare asmr,\u201d I wrote, and left it at that. But the real reason my disliking of the film grew by the minute was not due to my squeamishness. It was born from the immense sorrow I felt toward Elisabeth and Sue. Although they are not real people, the brutality they underwent because of the aesthetic pressure they felt is undeniable, and also redundant. <em>The Substance<\/em>\u2019s success was ultimately lauded for its commentary on ageism towards women, but any woman with half a brain and a lick of social awareness already knows this harsh reality. I felt consternation not for the film\u2019s rife messaging, but for its intense violence and degradation towards Elizabeth and Sue for buckling under the pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The film identifies sexism and ageism in a way that is intentionally palatable for male audiences: It provides shuddering violence toward women, coupled with a complete lack of responsibility from the men who push them to insanity (i.e. the male nurse who refers Elisabeth to The Substance\u2019s practitioner; Elisabeth\/Sue\u2019s chauvinistic manager; the medical company\u2019s phone operator who refuses to help the women during distress, and countless others). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Men identified the themes of the film with ease. Most had one of three reactions: They were either, for the first time, awoken to the harsh truth older women face daily (Peter Bradshaw of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/article\/2024\/may\/19\/the-substance-review-demi-moore-coralie-fargeat\"><em>The Guardian<\/em><\/a> <em><\/em>called it \u201can awful reckoning\u201d); found it boring, feminazi propaganda (Damon Wise\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/2024\/05\/the-substance-review-demi-moore-margaret-qualley-1235923616\/\"><em>Deadline<\/em><\/a> review described the movie as \u201cDemi Moore to make a hagsploitation body horror splatter movie\u201d); or disputed the claim that beauty standards affect women more than men (a riotous MAHA-inspired Reddit <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/TheSubstance\/comments\/1ir51gn\/relevance_of_the_substance_to_a_male_audience\/\">thread<\/a> called it \u201cpainfully similar\u201d to testosterone replacement therapy, scrutinized the lack of a focus on a male character who has taken The Substance, and claimed men are just as affected socially by aging). So who, then, is <em>The Substance<\/em> actually for, when it overstates what half the planet already knows and the other half remains obstinately ignorant towards?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of the \u201cfeminist\u201d body horror media that followed <em>The Substance<\/em> begs the same question: Is all this violence toward women even necessary?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Female protagonists in recent body horror films are mainly characterized by their intense insecurities and their betrayal of their bodies in the pursuit of obtaining \u201cperfect beauty,\u201d whatever that may entail, depending on the specific angle the film is trying to explore. Last year\u2019s <em>The Ugly Stepsister<\/em> looks at female intrasexual competition through a Victorian woman named Elvira who subjects herself to archaic plastic surgery in order to filch the love of a prince away from her more attractive stepsister. A female-centered adaptation of the racial politics of Jordan Peele\u2019s <em>Get Out<\/em>, <em>Slanted<\/em>, which came out in April, follows a young Chinese American highschooler, Joan, who undergoes cosmetic surgery to look white in order to become prom queen. In <em>The Beauty,<\/em> a pair of FBI agents investigates a pharmaceutical executive who accidentally unleashes a deadly lab-grown STD that turns people so hot they combust, then markets the cure for an exorbitant price, in a critique of Big Pharma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The female characters in these stories are vehemently tortured for their decisions to give into the societal oppression of whatever form of lookism they are obligated to inhabit. Despite breaking her nose, sewing fake eyelashes into her eyelids, consuming a tapeworm, cutting off her toes, and breaking all of her teeth, Elvira watches her stepsister get whisked away by the prince while she is stuck unmarried under the tyrannical rule of her evil mother. After Joan\u2019s skin begins to melt on stage during her prom crowning, she rips her face off in the hopes of finding her prior self. <em>The Beauty<\/em> starts out with none other than Bella Hadid imploding, and ends with a young insecure woman intentionally catching a mutated strain of virus, then transforming into a creature that looks like a one-to-one replica of <em>The Substance<\/em>\u2019s monster. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Through female body horror, audiences are told that sexism, ageism, racism, and corporate greed are <em>bad<\/em>, but the people who pay the price for society\u2019s ills are the women who fall victim to them, not the perpetrators. Is the only way to discuss the chasmic anti-woman sentiments that pervade every form of oppression to change a woman\u2019s physical appearance? To make her helpless to the joy of being \u201cbeautiful\u201d\u2014which I guess is now the same as belonging\u2014until, <em>poof!<\/em>, she is destroyed due to her insatiable greed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These rituals of punishment women face are not new nor exclusive to the body horror genre; they are repackaged from the conservative slashers of the 1970s and \u201980s. In 1990, researchers Gloria Cowan and Margaret O\u2019Brien found that, from an <a href=\"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1007\/BF00289865\">analysis<\/a> of 474 victims in 56 films, slashers separated \u201cgood\u201d women from \u201cbad\u201d women through their proclivity for survival. \u201cGood\u201d women were not promiscuous, and more likely to survive. But women who were sexual were deemed \u201cbad\u201d women, and therefore allowed to be punished by the deadly, ironic penetration of a blade from a male killer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As seen in modern body horror, men are no longer the sole antagonists of the genre. But, although gender and film scholar Barbara Creed identified changing attitudes towards female anti-heroes in her foundational 1993 text <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=90lCwCcQaTYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false\"><em>The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis<\/em><\/a>, she said, \u201cI am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is \u2018liberated\u2019 or \u2018feminist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The idea that the woman willingly turns herself into the monster through her ignorant obsequiousness to beauty, as Creed said over thirty years ago, is in no way progressive. Body horror recognizes the societal pressures that push their protagonists to seek out such extreme measures, but points the finger at the women who crack underneath these pressures. They are to blame; they have brought this fate upon themselves. <em>Don\u2019t crumble under the expectations that have been put upon you since you were a young girl, even if it costs you your job, your freedom, your life.<\/em> And if you can\u2019t handle it, your ultimate punishment is not your pain, it\u2019s not even being turned into a fly or killed by a television frequency. It is being ugly\u2014the worst thing a woman can be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I want to be clear: In the Ozempic era and age of Instagram- and Mar-a-Lago-face, I am not advocating for women to modify their appearances endlessly without critique. Whether cosmetic surgery is feminist is above my paygrade at the moment, and fluctuation of \u201ctrendy\u201d racial attributes is altogether confusing and dismaying. What I do mean to say is that there is actually a wealth of modern feminist body horror, it\u2019s just not what we\u2019re seeing on screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The recent body horror boom in literature predated <em>The Substance<\/em>, and has a bit more of it. While there is, of course, body horror literature that deals with changing one\u2019s appearance, it\u2019s only a fraction of the genre. For every novel like Ling Ling Huang\u2019s <em>Natural Beauty<\/em> and Mona Awad\u2019s <em>Rogue<\/em>, there are hundreds that take a critical lens to pressing issues without addressing them through a woman\u2019s appearance. Chelsea G. Summers\u2019s debut novel <em>A Certain Hunger<\/em>, about a food critic who kills and eats men after making love to them, is a visceral feast of discussions on the structural and social power imbalances between men and women; and Monika Kim\u2019s <em>The Eyes are the Best Part<\/em> tackles conversations of racism and fetishization through a young woman who fantasizes about eating blue eyeballs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The few literary adaptations that have made it to the silver screen seem to tame the original texts and are not representative of the diversity of the literature. The film adaptation of Rachel Yoder\u2019s novel <em>Nightbitch<\/em> domesticated the story of a mother turning into a dog into a sappy \u201cgirlboss\u201d drama, and Ryan Murphy\u2019s adaptation of Danielle Rollins\u2019 <em>Delicate Condition<\/em>, about an occult IVF treatment, rendered the original text unrecognizable, neutering its poignancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hollywood has a very specific idea as to what female body horror is. It\u2019s not to say that the creators of the individual films and series are anti-woman or even intentionally want to uplift violence towards women. I have no doubt in my mind that Fargeat and most other body horror filmmakers just want to point out these monstrous issues to a wide audience\u2014and horror being, at the moment, the widest\u2014but when Hollywood only greenlights shock and awe done unto women, it inadvertently creates a media landscape that is inherently anti-feminist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After a front-running campaign ahead of the 2025 Academy Awards, Demi Moore lost the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in <em>The Substance<\/em> to Mikey Madison. Many were quick to call out the irony of the situation: Madison\u2019s raven hair and alabaster skin is reminiscent of Moore\u2019s, a plausible younger version of herself. <em>I guess it was true<\/em>, netizens opined, The Substance <em>fixed nothing!<\/em> (Along with, <em>Doesn\u2019t Demi look reallllllly skinny and sickly?)<\/em> But the comments, these attempts to pit Moore and Madison against each one another, are what <em>The Substance<\/em> actually highlights about our current culture. It is the real evil, the real mysterious lab and green goop. Pitting women against one another, humiliating them for their insecurities, punishing them for their flaws\u2014it will never solve the underlying issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Perhaps I\u2019ll take a break from these films until I see a man punished for his satyromania toward young women, or a director disintegrate the social structures upholding these values instead of the protagonist\u2019s face. Perhaps I will never return. I don\u2019t want to watch the women who resemble me and my friends tortured for a burden we did not create. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Substance falls right into the same historic trappings of the misogynistic punishment rituals that horror has long perpetrated. So why is the film\u2014and the media it has inspired since its release\u2014hailed as a feminist masterpiece?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":"{\"authors\":[88903],\"author_categories\":{\"88903\":\"1\"},\"fallback_author_user\":\"140487\",\"ppma_author_box_select\":\"\",\"selected_authors\":[{\"id\":88903,\"display_name\":\"Isabella Bernstein\",\"is_guest\":1,\"category_id\":\"1\"}]}"},"categories":[88628],"tags":[8535],"ppma_author":[88903],"class_list":["post-258482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism","tag-criticism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Is Body Horror Skin Deep?: How "The Substance" ushered in a new era of anti-woman horror - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Substance falls right into the same historic trappings of the misogynistic punishment rituals that horror has long perpetrated. 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So why is the film\u2014and the media it has inspired since its release\u2014hailed as a feminist masterpiece?","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Is Body Horror Skin Deep?: How \"The Substance\" ushered in a new era of anti-woman horror - The Rumpus","og_description":"The Substance falls right into the same historic trappings of the misogynistic punishment rituals that horror has long perpetrated. So why is the film\u2014and the media it has inspired since its release\u2014hailed as a feminist masterpiece?","og_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/","og_site_name":"The Rumpus","article_publisher":"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet","article_published_time":"2026-09-21T14:40:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-09-21T16:01:27+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1400,"height":788,"url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/substance.webp?wsr","type":"image\/webp"}],"author":"Isabella Bernstein","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@the_rumpus","twitter_site":"@the_rumpus","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Juliana Luna","Est. reading time":"14 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/"},"author":{"name":"Juliana Luna","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/person\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4"},"headline":"Is Body Horror Skin Deep?: How “The Substance” ushered in a new era of anti-woman horror","datePublished":"2026-09-21T14:40:00+00:00","dateModified":"2026-09-21T16:01:27+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/"},"wordCount":2834,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/substance.webp?wsr","keywords":["criticism"],"articleSection":["Criticism"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/","name":"Is Body Horror Skin Deep?: How \"The Substance\" ushered in a new era of anti-woman horror - The Rumpus","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/21\/is-body-horror-skin-deep-how-the-substance-ushered-in-a-new-era-of-anti-woman-horror\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/substance.webp?wsr","datePublished":"2026-09-21T14:40:00+00:00","dateModified":"2026-09-21T16:01:27+00:00","description":"The Substance falls right into the same historic trappings of the misogynistic punishment rituals that horror has long perpetrated. 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Her work has shown up in places such as the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Boston Globe<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">CULTURED<\/span><\/i> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Magazine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, where she specializes in covering film, literature, music, fine arts, and general cultural criticism. She is currently a senior at Northeastern University, where she studies journalism and criminal justice, and is the editor-in-chief of her campus' magazine, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Avenue<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span><\/p>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/substance.webp?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258482"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258838,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258482\/revisions\/258838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258482"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258439,"date":"2026-09-18T10:08:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258439"},"modified":"2026-09-18T11:31:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T15:31:38","slug":"susan-howe-music-until-proven-otherwise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/susan-howe-music-until-proven-otherwise\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Howe: Music Until Proven Otherwise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When embarking upon a collaboration with Susan Howe, I begin by familiarizing myself with her poem, but once I\u2019ve recorded her reading it I set aside the written text and for my purposes the recorded version becomes definitive. That\u2019s how the process has started for each of the five performance pieces we\u2019ve made together over the last two decades. After I\u2019ve said goodbye to the poem on the page, it might be years before I return to the published version, and when I do, invariably I discover my relation to the text altered. When revisiting the work, I have Susan\u2019s voice with all its precision of diction and intentionality of delivery in my head, anticipating the printed version, pulling me through the text at the tempo of her reading. Although I\u2019ve yet to make a mark in my copies of \u201cThorow\u201d or \u201cMelville\u2019s Marginalia\u201d\u2014the two poems that comprise <em>Thiefth<\/em> (2005), our first collaboration\u2014every time Susan and I rehearse or perform one of these pieces, she adds another layer of marks in colored pencil to her performance scripts. Over the years, these have become fascinatingly detailed, very beautiful documents with underscores and marginal notes in a sheaf of colors. (Don\u2019t forget that Susan\u2019s first work of criticism, the landmark <em>My Emily Dickinson<\/em>, is a model of careful attention to manuscripts.) I\u2019m frequently peering over her shoulder, curious to see the changes her scripts have undergone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Stepping away from the printed text is freeing. It allows me to listen with greater focus, to encounter the poem differently, and to attend more fully to the sonic dimensions of the work. Susan\u2019s performance in all of its nuance becomes the spine of the sound composition. I learn the rhythms of her reading. I learn the emphases that shade her vocalizing, details in her handling of the poem that wouldn\u2019t be evident to a reader, and I map the range of intensities in her transformation of print into acoustic events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Susan and I first met in 2003, when we were invited to create a performance for the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Before we concluded our first meeting, I proposed that I record her reading. Minutes later I was holding a Shure VP88 stereo microphone with my elbows propped on a wobbly table. She selected \u201cThorow\u201d and \u201cMelville\u2019s Marginalia,\u201d as they had been published in French translation, which would facilitate the proposed bilingual performance with poet Dominique Fourcade reading from the French. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThorow\u201d begins with a prose introduction that describes the circumstances of the 1987 writer\u2019s residency that brought her to Lake George, New York:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The town, or what is left of a town, is a travesty. Scores of two-star motels have been arbitrarily scrambled between gas stations and gift shops selling Indian trinkets, china jugs shaped like breasts with nipples for spouts, American flags in all shapes and sizes, and pornographic bumper-stickers. There are two Laundromats, the inevitable McDonald\u2019s, a Howard Johnson, assorted discount leather outlets, video arcades, a miniature golf course, two run-down amusement parks, a fake fort where a real fort once stood, a Dairy-Mart, a Donut-land, and a four-star Ramada Inn built over an ancient Indian burial ground. Everything graft, everything grafted. And what is left when spirits have fled from holy places? <sup data-fn=\"ce7b2a79-e672-4625-a4d0-876ad8ab7227\" class=\"fn\"><a href=\"#ce7b2a79-e672-4625-a4d0-876ad8ab7227\" id=\"ce7b2a79-e672-4625-a4d0-876ad8ab7227-link\">1<\/a><\/sup>         <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Prose plays a crucial role in Susan\u2019s books of poetry. Not only do they provide welcome entrees into poems in which it can be hard to establish one\u2019s bearings, but they also introduce the possibility of those rapid qualitative changes between prose and verse\u2014solid to liquid, liquid to gas\u2014that lend a productive instability to her presentations, keeping the listener in a state of anticipation. As she began reading \u201cThorow,\u201d I found myself thinking about the transformation of its printed version to performance or audio recording. I wondered how the prose introduction might function in our live performance. I came into the project with a bias toward musicality, however unfamiliar a form that might take; I was eager to work with writing of hers in which the sonic patterning was at its freest and most unpredictable. As regards what I might bring to the collaboration in terms of instrumentation or arrangement, my impulse was to begin by listening closely to Susan\u2019s voice. This led me to contemplate whether her voice could be the only source material for the piece, and I was especially interested to hear how she would handle the third and final section of the poem, in which lines have been severed and scattered, with individual words and even individual letters strewn as fragments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This was my introduction to understanding the facing pages in Susan\u2019s books, their tendency to function as a composite image. On the poem\u2019s penultimate spread, the verso and recto are identical but with the recto page flipped 180 degrees; each page contains text that is right side up, upside down, and skewed at a variety of angles. Having been familiar with \u201cThorow\u201d before working with Susan on the piece, I assumed that a salient feature of these and similar pages was that one finds a different path through the tangle of lines with each reading. I still think that\u2019s true for the individual reader\u2014one is unlikely to settle upon a single, determinate method for how to read these pages, and how one encounters its component parts remains in flux. That\u2019s part of its appeal. I was fascinated, however, to realize upon hearing Susan read \u201cThorow\u201d on numerous occasions that she has a clear path through these pages, and that what I had presumed to be a species of indeterminate performance functions otherwise in her own reading.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a listener\u2014sitting at the table with headphones on, doing my best to keep the microphone as steady as possible\u2014I found Susan\u2019s reading enthralling. As a reader, I found it enlightening. In her handling of \u201cThorow,\u201d she cuts words in a manner redolent of taking a razor blade to audio tape, and indeed she explained to me that one of the tasks she loved most when hosting the WBAI New York radio show \u201cPoetry\u201d from 1971 to 1980 was editing tape.<sup data-fn=\"2580b112-cf6f-4f49-8c53-5308a135e272\" class=\"fn\"><a href=\"#2580b112-cf6f-4f49-8c53-5308a135e272\" id=\"2580b112-cf6f-4f49-8c53-5308a135e272-link\">2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once I had the recording of Susan reading \u201cThorow,\u201d I started with the third and final section. I cut the recording into a collection of lines and then individual words. I kept cutting until I was working with syllables and stray consonants, sometimes shaping fragments into smooth, isolable objects and sometimes reveling in the harshness of the cut. Just as the penultimate spread of \u201cThorow\u201d features textual superimpositions, I overlaid Susan\u2019s performance of that final section with dozens of fragments from the gamut I had assembled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I scattered. First, I scattered by ear\u2014what sounded best with what, which clusters had the greatest aural impact\u2014and then I scattered by eye. In the edit window of the digital audio workstation, I learned to trust my visual apprehension, placing audio clips by sight and periodically listening to the results. Rather than using the computer as a real-time musical instrument, I approached the software as a tool for collage. It was a slow, involved, repetitive, often meditative process of placing minuscule sonic elements, of scattering with deliberation and deliberateness. To give an example, I might create a fleeting event in which eight different syllables are lined up to sound simultaneously; I would experiment with pushing and pulling them in time, listening, muting, or downplaying some and emphasizing others through equalization or placement within the mix. In the final version of the piece, it\u2019s difficult to tell which pops and snaps and violent interruptions were created in my editing and recomposing and which occurred in that first performance in my living room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I typically have a method in mind and an end in sight when I begin work on a piece, and this was one of the rare, cherished instances\u2014one of those instructive instances\u2014in which I truly did not. The poem\u2019s final spat-out utterance is the word \u201cThiefth,\u201d part of a densely compacted envoi: \u201cthou sculling me \/ Thiefth.\u201d I experienced this unfamiliar word as suggestive of our method in that initially I apprehended it as having been spliced together.<sup data-fn=\"783cc9bb-ffaf-4b4e-b9a4-17de3f9c4c90\" class=\"fn\"><a href=\"#783cc9bb-ffaf-4b4e-b9a4-17de3f9c4c90\" id=\"783cc9bb-ffaf-4b4e-b9a4-17de3f9c4c90-link\">3<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After a period of working exclusively with Susan\u2019s voice, it struck me that this might work for one section, but that I needed additional sonic material with which to compose. I had arrived at the moment of essaying an answer to the question, \u201cWhy add anything to Susan\u2019s poetry?\u201d My initial impulse that everything be generated from her voice had started to seem showy, as if my purpose were to demonstrate how much could be done with how little source material, and so I decided to limit the scatter effect to the poem\u2019s final section. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once again I needed a place to begin. Susan and I had talked about Charles Ives, especially the final movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2, <em>Concord, Mass., 1840\u201360<\/em>, \u201cThoreau.\u201d Near the end of the movement, there is a brief, unanticipated flute part that\u2019s meant to represent Thoreau playing his instrument by the edge of Walden Pond. As Ives wrote, \u201cThoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute, but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear \u2018the Symphony.\u2019\u201d<sup data-fn=\"4d04247a-15fb-46e7-8b8c-02b35620263b\" class=\"fn\"><a href=\"#4d04247a-15fb-46e7-8b8c-02b35620263b\" id=\"4d04247a-15fb-46e7-8b8c-02b35620263b-link\">4<\/a><\/sup> This prompted me to ask the Swedish reed player Mats Gustafsson to record variations on the flute theme from Ives\u2019s \u201cThoreau\u201d on the fluteophone, an instrument that Mats created by jamming a saxophone mouthpiece into the body of a flute. In \u201cBartleby the Scrivener,\u201d Melville describes Bartleby\u2019s voice as quick and flute-like\u2014that\u2019s the quality I desired. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mats provided me with several improvisations based on the \u201cThoreau\u201d flute part and tossed in a couple of baritone saxophone variations for good measure. In the end, I found the baritone versions particularly satisfying, especially when lowered in pitch so they betray even greater physical exertion, like heavy furniture being dragged across a wooden floor. The pitch-altered baritone sax has the uniquely striated texture of someone\u2014a large someone\u2014gaspingly short of breath, which further distinguishes the instrument from the airy and comparatively colorless fluteophone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In lieu of the prose introduction that appears in the published version of \u201cThorow,\u201d we settled on a nearly wordless first section to precede the poem. This introduction begins with two- and three-note phrases from the pitched-down baritone saxophone, beginning and beginning again, gathering and regathering to repeatedly start anew. Short rhythmic fragments of the fluteophone recording are placed atop one another in loops of differing lengths. Discrete, decontextualized samples of Susan\u2019s voice from later in the poem occasionally break through to punctuate the end of a musical phrase or shatter the increasingly long silences: \u201cstrict distant day,\u201d \u201canthens,\u201d \u201cblue wov,\u201d a deep inhale of breath, the click of a tongue. In the second and third sections of the piece, corresponding to the first two numbered sections of the poem, Susan\u2019s reading is paired with sustained tones on the baritone sax and fluteophone\u2014this time with a calmer, more measured breathing\u2014and brittle, bitcrushed electronic salvos as well as a droning cello played with a curved, slack-haired bow that permits one to play the instrument\u2019s four strings simultaneously. Listening now, I\u2019m struck by the sudden overlappings of Susan\u2019s voice in these sections\u2014decisions not strictly motivated by the text, but which now strike me as propitious with regard to our working together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even at that early stage in our collaboration, I must have felt a degree of freedom such that not every compositional choice needed to be justified with reference to the text. I wasn\u2019t as cautious and timidly respectful as I recalled. I can\u2019t reconstruct the logic of these choices and that suits me well. Susan\u2019s delivery at its fiercest propels us into the final section, the effect heightened by stacking and slightly offsetting recordings of individual lines; every word remains comprehensible while the time manipulation results in echoing delays of varying lengths. The sonic space resists coherent mapping. This outburst ideally approximates the wild scatter of text on the page. When the irruptive squall of language abates, when storm clouds separate, Susan intones, \u201cYou are of me & I of you, I cannot tell \/ Where you leave off and I begin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let\u2019s pause there: \u201cI cannot tell \/ Where you leave off and I begin.\u201d The disorienting quality of not being able to identify the source of a voice is something that Susan and I were eager to explore in live performance. During soundcheck, a standard litmus test was whether, with eyes closed, I could tell whether I was hearing Susan\u2019s live reading or recordings of her voice, this seamless blending of the two (or three or four). I wanted to hear multiple Susans and not a duet between human Susan and digital Susan. My attraction to this confusion of voices originates in the cuts of her own poetry, those fascinating self-interruptions that operate on a continuum between language and sonic abstraction. She continues to surprise me with how detailed these fragments of vocalized text can be. That smallest jab of sound\u2014some of my favorite music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For \u201cMelville\u2019s Marginalia,\u201d the second piece in this first collaboration, I composed piano music. I wanted us to perform together without me being stuck behind a computer\u2014the ignominy of scrutinizing a monitor in the presence of an audience. My goal was real-time musicality, fingertip subtlety I could enjoy. I\u2019m no virtuoso on the piano, but even less of one when using the computer as an instrument in performance. Listening now to the recording of \u201cMelville\u2019s Marginalia,\u201d the piano part is much as I remember it, but what draws me particularly close are the sounds of dripping and cracking from recordings made in my Brooklyn apartment during an especially cold winter. The back window had frozen over\u2014it became a sheet of ice\u2014but the heavy snowfall that was beginning to melt caused the roof to leak in multiple spots, delivering an unpredictable percussive patter of water dripping into buckets and pans. I\u2019d like to think that I can hear gusts of wind against the poorly fitting sash\u2014I may be relying on my memory\u2014but I can unambiguously make out the distant, intermittent sounds of airplanes overhead, located as we were in the flight path of LaGuardia Airport. After several years in that apartment I had learned to tune out the rumble of aircraft, but there it is on the recording of \u201cMelville\u2019s Marginalia.\u201d Odd things happen when you point a microphone at a window. Microphones hear extraordinary things, by which I mean extraordinarily ordinary things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Photo credit: R.H. Quaytman<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-footnotes\"><li id=\"ce7b2a79-e672-4625-a4d0-876ad8ab7227\">Susan Howe, \u201cThorow,\u201d <em>Singularities<\/em> (Middletown, Conn. and Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1990), 40. <a href=\"#ce7b2a79-e672-4625-a4d0-876ad8ab7227-link\" aria-label=\"Jump to footnote reference 1\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><li id=\"2580b112-cf6f-4f49-8c53-5308a135e272\">The collection \u201cSusan Howe Radio Program Sound Recordings\u201d is housed at the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego. A selection of these recordings is available to stream on the online archive PennSound: <a href=\"https:\/\/writing.upenn.edu\/pennsound\/x\/Howe-Pacifica.php\">https:\/\/writing.upenn.edu\/pennsound\/x\/Howe-Pacifica.php<\/a>. <a href=\"#2580b112-cf6f-4f49-8c53-5308a135e272-link\" aria-label=\"Jump to footnote reference 2\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><li id=\"783cc9bb-ffaf-4b4e-b9a4-17de3f9c4c90\">\u201cThiefth\u201d resembles the Middle English word \u201cthiefthe\u201d and the Old English \u201cth\u012befth,\u201d meaning \u201ctheft.\u201d <a href=\"#783cc9bb-ffaf-4b4e-b9a4-17de3f9c4c90-link\" aria-label=\"Jump to footnote reference 3\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><li id=\"4d04247a-15fb-46e7-8b8c-02b35620263b\">The passage continues, \u201cThe rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer.\u201d (Charles Ives, <em>Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings<\/em> [<em>New York: W.W. Norton, 1962<\/em>], 51). <a href=\"#4d04247a-15fb-46e7-8b8c-02b35620263b-link\" aria-label=\"Jump to footnote reference 4\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the irruptive squall of language abates, when storm clouds separate, Susan intones, \u201cYou are of me & I of you, I cannot tell \/ Where you leave off and I begin.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"Susan Howe, \u201cThorow,\u201d <em>Singularities<\/em> (Middletown, Conn. and Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1990), 40.\",\"id\":\"ce7b2a79-e672-4625-a4d0-876ad8ab7227\"},{\"content\":\"The collection \u201cSusan Howe Radio Program Sound Recordings\u201d is housed at the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego. A selection of these recordings is available to stream on the online archive PennSound: <a href=\\\"https:\/\/writing.upenn.edu\/pennsound\/x\/Howe-Pacifica.php\\\">https:\/\/writing.upenn.edu\/pennsound\/x\/Howe-Pacifica.php<\/a>.\",\"id\":\"2580b112-cf6f-4f49-8c53-5308a135e272\"},{\"content\":\"\u201cThiefth\u201d resembles the Middle English word \u201cthiefthe\u201d and the Old English \u201cth\u012befth,\u201d meaning \u201ctheft.\u201d\",\"id\":\"783cc9bb-ffaf-4b4e-b9a4-17de3f9c4c90\"},{\"content\":\"The passage continues, \u201cThe rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer.\u201d (Charles Ives, <em>Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings<\/em> [<em>New York: W.W. Norton, 1962<\/em>], 51).\",\"id\":\"4d04247a-15fb-46e7-8b8c-02b35620263b\"}]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":"{\"authors\":[88912],\"author_categories\":{\"88912\":\"1\"},\"fallback_author_user\":\"140487\",\"ppma_author_box_select\":\"\",\"selected_authors\":[{\"id\":88912,\"display_name\":\"David Grubbs\",\"is_guest\":1,\"category_id\":\"1\"}]}"},"categories":[88701],"tags":[9416],"ppma_author":[88912],"class_list":["post-258439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Susan Howe: Music Until Proven Otherwise - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When the irruptive squall of language abates, when storm clouds separate, Susan intones, \u201cYou are of me & I of you, I cannot tell \/ Where you leave off and I begin.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/susan-howe-music-until-proven-otherwise\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Susan Howe: Music Until Proven Otherwise - 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He is the author of <em>Good night the pleasure was ours<\/em>, <em>The Voice in the Headphones<\/em>, <em>Now that the audience is assembled,<\/em> and <em>Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording<\/em> (all published by Duke University Press). As a musician, Grubbs has released sixteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases.<\/p>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Howe-Grubbs-2005-by-R.H.-Quaytman-scaled.jpeg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258439"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258782,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258439\/revisions\/258782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258439"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258155,"date":"2026-09-18T08:35:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T12:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258155"},"modified":"2026-09-14T08:38:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:38:48","slug":"two-poems-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>LOVE POEM BEGINNING WITH TWO LINES BY SAMUEL JOHNSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Time hovers o\u2019er, impatient to destroy,<br \/>And shuts up all the passages of joy<br \/>Saint Augustine said he only knew<br \/>what time was if he didn\u2019t have to explain it.<br \/>Lucille Clifton wrote \u201ctime is another name for God\u201d<br \/>in a poem called \u201crust.\u201d<br \/>I think time zigzags like a violin.<br \/>I think time hisses<br \/>out of my watch like a gas.<br \/>I once read a poem that began \u201cShut up\u201d<br \/>and continued, \u201cto be alone is to be alive.\u201d If time<br \/>is the sound of God\u2019s scorched laughing,<br \/>then we will wrinkle like eels in Maryland\u2019s great Gunpowder River.<br \/>If silence really is a way of knowing, I know I have to start over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>THERE IS A PROVERB ABOUT THE THIEF CAUGHT STEALING DURING A FIRE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kathryn says these are the things that give hope: a white dog in the snow howling at the train gone by <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sei Shonagon says these are the topics of poetry: The capital. The kudzu vine. The water burr. Horses. Hail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They say a jellyfish once slid down the throat of a famous swimmer<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They say if you have things you only worry about them<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My father was born in the 59th most polluted city in the world <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My mother told me she wished she could go away<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In poem XIII, Catullus invites his friend Fabullus over to dinner but requests that Fabullus bring all the food, wine, women, salt, laughter<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Catullus cites his poverty, his \u201clittle purse filled only with cobwebs\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes your wolf becomes another wolf<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes your sister, a different sister<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was told to avoid eating certain foods in lonely places <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was told to \u201ccarry some metal,\u201d not to step on bone or hair or human ash <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a proverb about drowning in two inches of water <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I, too, have something in me like a gun<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I, too, live in the remote wilderness of Antarctica<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a proverb about the thief caught stealing during a fire<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How he will be placed into the fire as well<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think time zigzags like a violin.<br \/>\nI think time hisses<br \/>\nout of my watch like a gas. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":"{\"authors\":[88902],\"author_categories\":{\"88902\":\"1\"},\"fallback_author_user\":\"140487\",\"ppma_author_box_select\":\"\",\"selected_authors\":[{\"id\":88902,\"display_name\":\"A.R. Zarif\",\"is_guest\":1,\"category_id\":\"1\"}]}"},"categories":[10691],"tags":[667],"ppma_author":[88902],"class_list":["post-258155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Two Poems - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I think time zigzags like a violin. 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I think time hisses out of my watch like a gas.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-18T12:35:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/DSCF2045-Adnan-Zarif-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1707\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"A.R. 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Zarif","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@the_rumpus","twitter_site":"@the_rumpus","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Juliana Luna","Est. reading time":"2 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/"},"author":{"name":"Juliana Luna","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/person\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4"},"headline":"Two Poems","datePublished":"2026-09-18T12:35:59+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/"},"wordCount":356,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/DSCF2045-Adnan-Zarif-scaled.jpg?wsr","keywords":["poetry"],"articleSection":["Poetry"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/","name":"Two Poems - The Rumpus","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/18\/two-poems-23\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/DSCF2045-Adnan-Zarif-scaled.jpg?wsr","datePublished":"2026-09-18T12:35:59+00:00","description":"I think time zigzags like a violin. 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Zarif","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A. R. Zarif is from Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Poetry<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> magazine, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Iowa Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harvard Divinity Bulletin<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bennington Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chicago Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Margins<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and other publications. He holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia.<\/span><\/p>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/DSCF2045-Adnan-Zarif-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258155"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258616,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258155\/revisions\/258616"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258155"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258437,"date":"2026-09-17T09:51:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258437"},"modified":"2026-09-14T08:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:27:12","slug":"synthetic-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Synthetic Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201c<em>The spiritual journey is not about heaven.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0<br \/> \u2014Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Flit <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And now it is summer. The sun coming into the room hot, the sheets on the line starting to billow in the warm wind. And the moment my hand is about to touch the pill. The palm the heat the crushed white powder sprinkled over a blunt. I am waking up. I awake on my back, on my friend\u2019s couch, in the city. The sun pouring in through the slats of the blinds. My eyes flitting at the ceiling, my limbs aching in pain. Trying to calm down. But the moment my throat finds the word for what I need, the pill the powder the drug is already gone. Swallowed, metabolized. And already I am awaking again, sweating again, yelling again. I awake to the wide blue sky. The hottest day of summer, sun all around. I shove my hands under my armpits to try and stop the shaking. It is the past inside of me, roaring again. And what does it say? <em>And I was alive. And I was human. And I was in pain. And I was every animal that wanted a way out.<\/em> I awake to the worst day of summer. The one where I say, \u201cokay this is the last time,\u201d <em><\/em>and more than oxy and percocet and crushed white powder over weed, the speediest of speed balls, I said, \u201cI just need one last pill and then I\u2019m going to give it all up.\u201d Sweating in the ruthless furnace of the world. I just need a little relief. To be gone, for a bit. The glare of the sun prickling my eyes. I swallow the pill the powder the syrup and my body is speeding away. Only to awake again. To bump up against the hard lip of reality, again. In agony, again. I realize when I awake to the wide ochre sky bleeding rust into deep blue. How could I be gone? I was never truly here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>\u201cTo Give \/ the Body What It Knows \/ It Cannot Keep\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first time I take a benzodiazepine is in the summer I am seventeen. It is the afternoon and a dream is coming. A man is in my house, a man is coming toward me, my frantic shadow, which was much smaller then, flits long on the concrete. This is the moment everything I know will fall apart and end, can go no further, but also the moment everything I am scared of will begin, again.Something happened a long time ago. Something is happening still. I watch him enter the apartment and begin to grasp, as if in slow-motion, what is about to happen to me, but just like now, just like then, I can\u2019t stop him. The nightmare is so upsetting I am hitting myself when I awake, afternoon light prickling my eyes open, bruises are beginning to bloom along my legs. I awake to the loud silence of a chest, my own, I realize, heaving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Afterward, I leave my house in a daze. I find myself, that afternoon, carried to an emergency department in Camperdown. I talk to a psychiatrist. She hands me an amber bottle filled with a few off-white pills. \u201cValium,\u201d she says, touching my shoulder not untenderly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I walk home that night and the bottle rattles like thunder in the pocket of my shorts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I arrive home, I can\u2019t bring myself to go inside. I walk straight out into the night, into the backyard, and without thinking I take out a cigarette. A single light from the porch spills into the backyard as I stand there smoking. I walk right up to the back fence, and stand amongst the ferns and shrubbery, which is the furthest and darkest spot away from my house. One hand holding my cigarette while the other hand takes out the amber bottle. I shake the bottle a little. <em>Rattle, rattle.<\/em> I imagine my ma talking to me, in a low hushed voice, telling me\u2014like she did all those years ago in this backyard\u2014about what happened and how she was, \u201cSorry.\u201d And surrounded by the tropical air, which in a place like Sydney in the summer is humid even at night, I want to cry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But instead, I take a pill and swallow. And the edges of the night, the world, my vision, my memory goes mercifully\u2014soft. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Synthetic Heaven <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Years later, in an AA meeting, I would hear a disheveled man with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his eyes staring at the ground, say dreamily, \u201cWell, you know, it\u2019s like a synthetic heaven.\u201d And I would think, <em>God, he\u2019s right<\/em>. And when the high would hit, I would think to myself\u2014<em>This. This for as long as I can.<\/em> More than summer and bicycles and flowers littered on the pavement like confetti, more than the way Sydney looks in the spring, especially at night, the moon backlighting the exploding crabapple trees, the flowers perfuming the night air\u2014more than ocean pools and films and even the way the purpling sky in Marrickville looks at twilight when I would walk home after seeing the married woman I loved beyond all hope or reason. It is the relief of the crushed white powder. Synthetic heaven. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The man in AA would wear a jumper with a hole in it and he would look like he hadn\u2019t shaved in days and when he would finally look up, to face the room, I would see it. His eyes dreamy with sleep, in a cloudy trance, under a hazy scrim. The room might as well have been enveloped in smoke. He would sit down in his chair, languid. And I would think, although I would have been in AA for many years by that point, although I should have known better by that point, and said it’s closer to a synthetic hell than a heaven\u2014I would still think, <em>God I want to feel that easy in the world. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Interiors <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is how the evening unfolds: There is a dark blue valley somewhere across the country, and in that valley, tiny specks of houses. Windows of yellow light dotting the land. Inside one of these houses, I go to bed clutching an amber bottle. And after I swallow, which is always warm and steady and feels like drawling around vowels, beads of relaxation form within me. And although I am often lying on my bed exhausted, still in the clothes that I wore to work or university, and nightmares encroach like shadows, slowly there is a soft laugh. And the corners of my mouth droop down into a smile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The cool feeling of the plush doona. A weight that sinks as I lie down. Moonlight treading on the white sheets. Soft plush pillows. Pale blue sheets. A warm yellow lamp in the corner of the room. An open window, which I lie under. The sound of the night outside. A kind of hush over the city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I can\u2019t hear the click of a latch being undone anymore, the sound of shoes hitting the pavement frantically, the whine of a siren in the distance, a police car tearing through the cold dark city. All of it is turned down low, and then muted. I can only lie there and pull the bedsheet over my head. And the sheet isn\u2019t a sheet anymore but the sky and the lamp isn\u2019t a lamp anymore but the sun. And finally, I can sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Every Animal (I) <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That summer, I start attending a clinic at a hospital for group therapy. A woman, an in-patient at the clinic, complains to me on the first night about the hospital soap and the way it is drying out her skin. She shows me the small disc of angry red scales which has formed on her hand. She always had psoriasis, she explains, but now it flares on her hands, at the crook of her knees, her elbows, even her scalp. She scratches her head and exhales irritably. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am at the hospital three nights a week. Those nights become all harsh fluorescent lighting. Hard white tiles with the sharp unpleasant smell of disinfectant. Cold cafeteria meals, sandwiches. Occasionally, I buy a chocolate bar from a vending machine and take it back to the clinic to share with the other patients, some of whom have become my friends. Once, during a session, a woman describes how a parent punched her in the face when she was young and broke her nose. She points to her nose and the hairline fracture, I have to turn away, unable to look. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All night long but especially during the interminable hours after group therapy, when I am alone in the house again, I feel the weight of the amber bottle in my pocket. I lie on my bed and swallow. And swallow again. And then I am, for the briefest of moments, even when I am in the house, no longer in the house. I am running on a beach, I am watching shadows flit on the sand, I am trying to catch the off-white light pooling in the back of my throat, drip-feeding me relief. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Every Animal (II) <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All that summer, after I leave group therapy, I walk past the hospital ward. I often see a woman, through a window, lying in bed. She looks terrible. Graying hair, cracked lips. The woman seems confused and writhes around, like she is drifting in and out of consciousness. Occasionally, the woman wakes up and is agitated, scratching at the wires on her chest. Other times, the woman lies very still, as something drips from an IV bag next to her bed. Sometimes I watch as the woman, with her eyes still closed, presses the IV button in her hands, and then presses it again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One night, I walk past the woman\u2019s room after group therapy and I see her body, which seems small and bird-like, asleep in the hospital bed. And then I think to myself, <em>no. That\u2019s not right<\/em>. She doesn\u2019t look bird-like. She looks human. Like her body and mind are trying to find a way out. To be ok, even now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Komorebi Prose <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Years later, I would try to get sober. And walking up a street in Surry Hills in spring I would turn my head upward and notice, as if for the first time, sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree. And I would feel not happy. It would not be that easy. I would still be collapsing from body aches and not be able to keep food down. And I would still be puking from withdrawal or stress or the belief that I wouldn\u2019t be able to live without <em>something<\/em> for relief. It would not be that easy, no. But a small sense of astonishment would, suddenly, return. At the scattered light, streaming through the trees. The light and leaves moving like a blur of small wrens taking flight. A startlement. In the clear break of day, washed afresh, waking from the scrim. And feeling excruciating pain, feeling a fear that unfurled on the edges of an engulfing darkness, but also feeling alive. As Michael W. Clune writes in <em>White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin<\/em>, \u201cI remember \u2026 re-experiencing the taste of food, the pleasure of walking outside and being in nature \u2026 For an addict, those come as a revelation.\u201d And for a moment, on that street in spring, body tilting upward toward the trees and the sky, I would think to myself, <em>I could do it<\/em>. I could give up the crushed white powder, the dosage of relief, the technicolor simulacrum of heaven which was revealed, after all, to be just a simulacrum. And to just experience ordinary life, for a time, as enough. From an interview with Maggie Nelson in <em>The<\/em> <em>Paris Review<\/em> about her addiction to alcohol<em>:<\/em> \u201cThe thing is, quitting has to come \u2026 from a true exhaustion and an interest in what else there might be.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Dream Withdrawal <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But then\u2014a psychiatrist, one who worked in the same hospital where the medication was first prescribed, would say to me, \u201cIt\u2019s not easy to come off benzodiazepines. People can suffer from withdrawal symptoms worse than heroin or ice.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A psychatrist would read the withdrawal symptoms off a clipboard to me: \u201c…delusions, hallucinations, psychosis, seizures, suicidal ideations, heart palpitations, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, anxiety, insomnia\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I wouldn\u2019t know what to say to the psychiatrist, because she was wrong. Withdrawal is hard. But not just because you have to withdraw from a drug. It\u2019s because you have to withdraw from a dream. A dream that there is something in the world\u2014against nightmares, against intrusions, against loneliness, against the howl that sounds through the body when it is in pain\u2014that will make you feel better. A dream of rescue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The psychiatrist would read off a clipboard, \u201cMedication side effects, or adverse benzodiazepine tapering reactions, range from mild to severe\/life threatening.\u201d And I would want to respond, <em>Yes, but relief from pain. Yes, but meets the human desire to be okay.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Addiction as Memory Disease <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">frantic i am trying to catch the pill the powder the syrup flecked with gold tones. i start university but pills spill out of an amber bottle a doctor gave me. there are blanks. did i read         or        last week?  a photograph was taken with            on the lawns but the photo is already dissolving. wait              wait i\u2019m trying to remember how it felt to sleep          beside a woman i met late at night. her name was            and i thought she could save me but then we           and I never saw her again. my ma disclosed she was           and that\u2019s why she wasn\u2019t home that day. and I told her I wouldn\u2019t forget but I wanted to forget. the pill promised as the colours in the room were dissipating even more colour. but I open my mouth now. dark and cavernous and once more           catastrophically          empty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Just Say No <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is the past inside of me, roaring again. And what does it say? Rattle like I needed every pill I ever took. Rattle like there is terror in this world. Rattle like when I thought crushed white powder from an amber bottle, rattling light from the off-white moon trapped flickering inside, could save me. Rattle like I didn\u2019t even know that this is what surviving was. To rattle a bottle all night long. While in the dark, a cigarette flares and fades. Too quickly. Rattle like sometimes I wanted to escape the world. But rattle sometimes I wanted more of the world. More comfort, more color, more heat. Rattle if one feels good rattle then why isn\u2019t more better? Rattle like could you forgive the rattling? When I was on the floor all that summer, begging. Becoming every rattle\u2014desperate and hollow\u2014that rattled human through the night?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Author\u2019s Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The subtitle \u201cTo Give \/ the Body What It Knows \/ It Cannot Keep\u201d is borrowed from Ocean Vuong\u2019s poem \u201cOn Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous.\u201d The line is, \u201cfor hunger is to give \/ the body what it knows \/ it cannot keep.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cKomorebi Prose\u201d references an excerpt from Michael Clune\u2019s <em>White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cKomorebi Prose\u201d also references an excerpt from \u201cThe Art of Nonfiction, No.13\u201d interview from the <em>Paris Review,<\/em> which features Maggie Nelson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And when the high would hit, I would think to myself\u2014This. This for as long as I can. More than summer and bicycles and flowers littered on the pavement like confetti, more than the way Sydney looks in the spring, especially at night, the moon backlighting the exploding crabapple trees, the flowers perfuming the night air\u2014more than ocean pools and films and even the way the purpling sky in Marrickville looks at twilight when I would walk home after seeing the married woman I loved beyond all hope or reason. It is the relief of the crushed white powder. Synthetic heaven. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":"{\"authors\":[88887],\"author_categories\":{\"88887\":\"1\"},\"fallback_author_user\":\"140487\",\"ppma_author_box_select\":\"\",\"selected_authors\":[{\"id\":88887,\"display_name\":\"Tina Huang\",\"is_guest\":1,\"category_id\":\"1\"}]}"},"categories":[81576],"tags":[9465],"ppma_author":[88887],"class_list":["post-258437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-essay"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Synthetic Heaven - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"And when the high would hit, I would think to myself\u2014This. 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Synthetic heaven.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-17T13:51:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1920\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Tina Huang\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Juliana Luna\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"13 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Juliana Luna\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4\"},\"headline\":\"Synthetic Heaven\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-17T13:51:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":2679,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg?wsr\",\"keywords\":[\"essay\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Essays\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/\",\"name\":\"Synthetic Heaven - The Rumpus\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/17\\\/synthetic-heaven\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg?wsr\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-17T13:51:00+00:00\",\"description\":\"And when the high would hit, I would think to myself\u2014This. 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Synthetic heaven.","og_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/","og_site_name":"The Rumpus","article_publisher":"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet","article_published_time":"2026-09-17T13:51:00+00:00","og_image":[{"width":2560,"height":1920,"url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Tina Huang","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@the_rumpus","twitter_site":"@the_rumpus","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Juliana Luna","Est. reading time":"13 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/"},"author":{"name":"Juliana Luna","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/person\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4"},"headline":"Synthetic Heaven","datePublished":"2026-09-17T13:51:00+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/"},"wordCount":2679,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg?wsr","keywords":["essay"],"articleSection":["Essays"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/","name":"Synthetic Heaven - The Rumpus","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg?wsr","datePublished":"2026-09-17T13:51:00+00:00","description":"And when the high would hit, I would think to myself\u2014This. This for as long as I can. More than summer and bicycles and flowers littered on the pavement like confetti, more than the way Sydney looks in the spring, especially at night, the moon backlighting the exploding crabapple trees, the flowers perfuming the night air\u2014more than ocean pools and films and even the way the purpling sky in Marrickville looks at twilight when I would walk home after seeing the married woman I loved beyond all hope or reason. It is the relief of the crushed white powder. Synthetic heaven.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg?wsr","contentUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg?wsr","width":2560,"height":1920,"caption":"Photo Credit: Rajiv Bajaj via Unsplash"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/synthetic-heaven\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Synthetic Heaven"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#website","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/","name":"The Rumpus","description":"An independent arts and culture magazine for risk-taking voices.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization","name":"The Rumpus","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Rumpus-Logo-FC.png?wsr","contentUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Rumpus-Logo-FC.png?wsr","width":2560,"height":1707,"caption":"The Rumpus"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet","https:\/\/x.com\/the_rumpus","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/the_rumpus","https:\/\/therumpus.tumblr.com\/"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/person\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4","name":"Juliana Luna","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/23e7bcd4306ff58a34eb2645e984b76bf58a1517ff3259ac94f80fe088dcacbf?s=96&d=mm&r=gc90dbb975d959e35091c18702a00709e","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/23e7bcd4306ff58a34eb2645e984b76bf58a1517ff3259ac94f80fe088dcacbf?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/23e7bcd4306ff58a34eb2645e984b76bf58a1517ff3259ac94f80fe088dcacbf?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Juliana Luna"},"url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/author\/jnluna\/"}]}},"authors":[{"term_id":88887,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"tina-huang","display_name":"Tina Huang","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tina Huang is a Chinese Australian writer and poet. Her work has been published in Australia and internationally. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Rumpus<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">,<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Meanjin<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">,<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Australian Poetry Journal<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sydney Review of Books<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">and Cordite Poetry Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, among others. Her work has been recognized by prizes such as the Elizabeth Joelley Short Story Prize, the Furphy Literary Award, and the South Coast Centre\u2019s Poetry Award.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\n "}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/rajiv-bajaj-i4QIqfcTkN8-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258437"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258610,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258437\/revisions\/258610"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258437"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258431,"date":"2026-09-17T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258431"},"modified":"2026-09-09T14:57:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:57:45","slug":"the-dumbbell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/17\/the-dumbbell\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dumbbell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To relax, Eddie liked to lose himself in Twitter threads written by the most rabid TERFs on the internet. He would scroll, his phone screen the only source of light in whatever basement or bedroom he had flirted his way into that night. He would wade through quote tweets, analyze likes. He would pause at photos of keloided scars carved along flat chests\u2014always thin and hairless\u2014and rub his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Another beautiful girl ruined.\u00a0<\/em><br \/><em>This \u201cdoctor\u201d should face the wall.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie felt plenty ruined. But had he ever been beautiful? It was hard to remember, a decade into transition. He had been on the road for just as long, touring straight out of high school, alone with his guitar and hiking pack and sweaty bus tickets that bled ink onto his fingers. He\u2019d tried hitching it with bands\u2014a hardcore trio, a folk punk group whose ever-growing membership openly fought on stage\u2014but they never lasted. Everyone always wanted to go home before him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Years passed by in a vaseline blur, sticky and tactile. His body was a glue trap that gathered all kinds of flotsam: unexplained bruises, living room stick-n-pokes, fat gained and lost. Performing made him feel sexy in a way that embarrassed him when he thought about it later. He loved the sweat of it, the swagger. He loved the few humid inches between him and the pit, that ecstatic spiral of bodies stirred as if by heaven. He even loved the concussive threat of a kick to the head. It had happened before: a plum-sized welt and angry split skin, rivulets of blood tracing his cheekbone and dripping into his mouth. He liked the taste of blood. That much, he wasn\u2019t ashamed to admit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie didn\u2019t plan. He hitchhiked into cities and showed up at open mics, asking the crowd for a couch to crash on mid-set. Sometimes, after someone offered, he would find himself clinging to the arm of that couch as the host inched closer, little by little, saying something like, \u201cI\u2019ve always wanted to taste\u2014Can I say it?\u2014boy pussy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He tried to take it as a compliment. He didn\u2019t have anywhere else to go, after all. Touring didn\u2019t leave room for neutral experiences. It took away options, the illusion that his decisions meant anything. That was fine with him. Changing his sex was supposed to be the ultimate choice. Why should he have to make any others?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tonight he really scored\u2014a shower and a bed all to himself. It\u2019d been a short, damp walk from the bar. His host for the night, a rail-thin man who admitted to being too old for this communal living shit despite still doing it, had insisted on carrying his heavy pack. Eddie braced himself for the consequence of the gesture, the hand on his ass or mouth on his neck, but it never came. The host just pulled back one of the curtains that made up two walls of the \u201croom\u201d and gestured Eddie inside. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIgnore the cigarette burns. Miles is at a silent retreat but he doesn’t live like a monk. There\u2019ll be coffee in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Comfortable and naked save for a towel, Eddie settled onto the yellowed sheets with his phone. Not even the gym bag stench or the weights he\u2019d stubbed a toe on could sour a free bed. He flipped his pillow, turning the hair-wetted side away, feeling clean and pleased with himself. He was reading a thread by a mother grieving her child. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\"><em>She doesn\u2019t appreciate her beautiful body (no girl<\/em><br \/><em>does) but I never dreamed she would take it this far.<\/em><br \/><em>When I think about how she\u2019ll never breastfeed<\/em><br \/><em>all I can do is cry. She stopped taking<\/em><br \/><em>my calls. I\u2019ve lost her completely.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These women cared very much about his womb and its ability to incubate white babies, though they didn\u2019t always say it out loud. Instead they expressed <em>concerns<\/em>, asked <em>questions<\/em>; Eddie could read between the lines. They wanted him pregnant and keening. They wanted, he guessed, to grow foot-long cocks and fuck him themselves, squeeze his nipples until milk beaded through the scar tissue. But no\u2014it wasn\u2019t possible. He\u2019d never feel the shock of the speculum again, never white knuckle through three minutes in a bathroom while, in spite of every curse he could think of, a positive result materialized. He\u2019d made sure of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The curtains billowed as someone walked past. Eddie spotted a pair of feet and heard the bathroom fan rattle on. Light melted through the curtains from the open door, and piss splattered against the bowl. Eddie\u2019s dick stiffened under his towel. He considered going in there\u2014surely the open door was an invitation\u2014but thought better of it. Maybe the guy really was straight. But wasn\u2019t that hot in its own way? It was maybe even hotter. Eddie\u2019s groin throbbed. He leapt from the bed and tore a curtain askew, his towel falling to the floor as he spun back to the mattress and sprawled out. The toilet flushed. Eddie tilted his ass appealingly towards the gap. The light flicked off. He arched his back, a twinge running up his spine as the sheets tugged against his cock. Footsteps plodded towards him. He closed his eyes. He focused on making his every cell fuckable. Then the curtain rippled, and the footsteps passed, and the blur of the host disappeared into the dark. Eddie was left alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oh well\u2014he had run out of condoms a few cities ago. Eddie\u2019s stomach growled. He had forgotten to feed himself again. It was true that he was forgetful, but even when he did remember, he would sometimes skip a meal anyway. He had to stay sharp, keep his hips narrow, or at least save a few bucks. Of course he wasn\u2019t making any money\u2014every crumpled five went towards beer or his next bus ticket\u2014but that was part of touring\u2019s appeal. He wasn\u2019t playing into the middle class hoarding scheme, no thought spared to a savings account or emergency fund. It let him imagine himself as outside of the economy. The road took care of him, one way or another, even when he wasn\u2019t always safe. He\u2019d heard somewhere that safety was a flawed framework, anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie reached for his phone, but he was too horny to read anymore. He scrolled without absorbing anything. Even he had to admit that, in the end, these women were all pretty boring. As erotic as their disgust was, the outcome was tedious. Posting was their only hobby. Eddie shifted gears. He opened Twitter\u2019s search bar and started looking for porn. There were hundreds of videos from accounts like @<em>fak3b0yfixer<\/em> or @<em>detransme_baby<\/em>, all of them skimmed from uncredited sources. Captions like, <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\"><em>What every FTM wants\u00a0<\/em><br \/><em>is to be raped back into a girl<\/em>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">or <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The only time you\u2019ll ever\u00a0<\/em><br \/><em>have a dick between your legs<\/em><br \/><em>is when I\u2019m fucking you<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some of it was hot. He got the appeal, in a way. The humiliation of it all. A man had needs, and he was a man, definitely he was. A man who knew better than to not pay for his porn. Still, should he be blamed for getting off when he could, given the world, given everything? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie, on his stomach, started to grind against the mattress. He pushed the still-wet pillow between his legs and worked his hips harder, the bed complaining loudly as he thumbed past petite bodies convulsing beneath large, disembodied hands\u2014<em>welcome to the new government re-education center<\/em>\u2014lips stretching over cockheads, bangs falling across eyes\u2014<em>let your biology take over<\/em>\u2014breasts being cupped, slapped, studded with clothespins\u2014<em>even your orgasm is female\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie was close. He was panting and mewing (did he sound like a girl?) and trying to get over the edge. Not that the climax would be any good. He consumed the videos with the same dead eyes he did the TERF screeds. He didn\u2019t know which made him feel worse. At least the porn made him cum. And at least he would never be pregnant again. In the moment, though, brain flooded with pixels and endorphins, Eddie felt certain he could get knocked up, no abortion this time, the country was too far gone, and just when the thought almost did it for him, he scrolled to the next video. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A man was on his back, legs wide, getting his hole fucked by another man. It was a FTM performer Eddie had followed for years. He\u2019d already seen the video once, on the performer\u2019s page, but here it floated again, clipped to just twenty seconds. The performer\u2019s cheeks were rosy, lips cherubic. His chest was designer. There was something tender about the tilt of his head, about the way the top rubbed a hand across his stomach as they fucked. He looked like a version of Eddie who took care of himself, one who had money for better surgeons. Eddie\u2019s breath hitched. He slowed. He read the caption\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\"><em>anything with a cunt only has one job<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2014and felt the blood rush to his head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The performer, this man like him; he didn\u2019t ask for this. Eddie didn\u2019t either. He froze with two fingers hooked around the hood of his cock. He thought: <em>That could be me.<\/em> <em>They\u2019re talking about me. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie heard a moan, a real one. He whirled around, bunching the pillow over his crotch and batting away his phone. The host was standing at the edge of the curtains with a hand down his pants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cDon\u2019t stop,\u201d he said, \u201cI was close.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie kicked his way across the mattress, falling in a crouch on the other side of the bed. His guitar case crashed against his back. His chest heaved. His ruined orgasm was curdling into a wet, hot anger. The host stepped forward through the curtains with a hand out, pants falling to his ankles. His curved dick bounced. Eddie dropped to one knee and landed on something hard. He grabbed it, hefting it above his head as he sprang back to his feet. The host backed up\u2014it was a thirty pound dumbbell. Eddie kept pace, a step forward for every one back, until they were passing through the curtains into the living room. He swung wide, nowhere near contact. Black spots dotted his vision. He saw his arms in front of him but it was like they were a doll\u2019s, like he was motoring through a video game. The host took another step back. The edge of the coffee table caught him behind the knee and he went down, sitting on the table with a thud, the cheap pine cracking under his ass as rolling papers and takeout containers flew away from the impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie held the dumbbell over his head. He looked at the man sprawled before him. The host was sputtering, hands raised above his face, kicking at the debris. Eddie was naked. He was still half hard. His arms shook under the weight. A cramp twinged in his tricep. He was weak, so weak, even after all of these hormones. A failed woman\u2014that\u2019s what they would call him, whether he wanted it or not\u2014and, really, what was it that he wanted? What did he want? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A chill spidered across his scalp and down his spine. His arms gave out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The dumbbell fell, landing behind him with a crash and rolling away. The host lowered his hands. He sat up, his eyes wide and beanie askew, a gray flecked hairline peaking out. His head was level with Eddie\u2019s waist. The bathroom sink dripped. An animal skittered through the walls. The dumbbell rolled to a stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cYou\u2019re going to fuck me,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause I\u2019m letting you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eddie balled the host\u2019s hair in his fist and tugged him to his crotch. His back arched as the man\u2019s mouth wrapped around him. Hands reached up to cup his ass, widening his stance over the broken table and pulling him down. A splinter lodged in his calf. Hips aligned with hips, mouth with mouth, dick with dick, and all the while rain tapping impatient fingers across the skin of the flat roof. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The host did not gaze into Eddie\u2019s eyes. He did not kiss him on the mouth. But he did bring them to the couch, the leather worn so soft it felt almost alive, and he cradled Eddie\u2019s head as if it might break, as if it would matter if it did. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Years passed by in a vaseline blur, sticky and tactile. His body was a glue trap that gathered all kinds of flotsam: unexplained bruises, living room stick-n-pokes, fat gained and lost. Performing made him feel sexy in a way that embarrassed him when he thought about it later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[23715],"tags":[1206],"ppma_author":[88893],"class_list":["post-258431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Dumbbell - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Years passed by in a vaseline blur, sticky and tactile. 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