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Ryan Coleman

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"Summerland”: Review

“There is a place for escapism with an ethical backbone. More than ever, we need to be able to relax under the spell of fantasists we can trust not to poison us with irony or distort history to suit their ideology.“

Summerland is British dramatist and theater director Jessica Swale’s film directorial debut. It tells the story of Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton), a misanthropic young folklorist who is forced to care for a child evacuated from London in advance of the Nazi blitz. The film opens and closes on the great Dame Penelope Wilton as older Alice in the 1970s, and flashes of the character’s memories of being an Oxford girl in the ‘20s run through the middle, but Summerland is primarily a sort of wartime conversion narrative. Alice’s nature, scarred over by love lost and gone bitter, is gradually healed by the slow emergence of maternal love for the bright-eyed and innocent child, Frank, played with preternatural nuance by newcomer Lucas Bond.

When Frank is dropped at the doorstep of Alice’s romantically isolated cliffside cottage on the outskirts of a town in East Sussex, he finds her in a bitter and recalcitrant state. For their first dinner she hands him an uncooked potato, raw ham, and a whole egg. “You don’t expect me to cook it for you? There’s the stove,” she points, and walks back to her life’s great pursuit—her writing. She spends her days laced into a rigid routine of researching and composing “academic theses, not stories,” as she corrects a prying town elder (Tom Courtenay), that use science to debunk narrative folkloric explanations for strange natural phenomena.

Her life is solitary, studious, and mercilessly subjected to the strictest self-imposed routine. The war’s sudden imposition, via Frank, on that routine brings with it other, more upbraiding interruptions. His inadvertent puncturing of the hermetic seal on her life stirs up vivid flashbacks of a time when she was, like him, looking toward the future with innocent hope. In that time, her twenties in the ‘20s, she met Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Vera at a spring concert at Oxford. The spark was immediate, the chemistry undeniable. So began the hushed and rapturous affair whose sudden break has cast a long, withering shadow over Alice’s life. It is out from under this burden that Frank’s childlike curiosity and unquestioning faith in the goodness of other people begins to pull Alice.

Alice’s emotional flowering begins to dovetail with the subject of her latest inquiry—the Summerland myth. In the film, what Alice calls Summerland is actually Fata Morgana, or centuries-old mariner’s yarns of floating islands materializing inexplicably on the horizon, thought of as conjurings of the wicked sorceress of Arthurian lore, Morgan Le Fay. In reality, Summerland is a term created by theosophists in the 19th century to refer to a concept similar to heaven in ancient pagan cosmologies. Swale has simply nested the one within the visual of the other. Called variously The Otherworld, The Shining Land, and the Land of the Young by Celts, Summerland is “a land of eternal summer, with grassy fields and sweet flowing rivers,” like “Earth before the advent of humans,” writes popular witchsplainer Scott Cunningham. He could well be describing the pastoral, soft and sunlit setting of Swale’s film—the southeast English coast, shot gloriously on location.

If it’s possible to resist Summerland’s principal hook, namely, Swale’s ability to tell an intricately plotted, politically engaged, at times bleak story in a way that feels as sublime, escapist, and low stakes as the folklore its heroine is investigating, then the locations which provide backdrop for it all prove irresistible. It’s simply impossible to look at Gemma Arterton with no makeup on, hair free and flowing down her back, clad in a warm wardrobe of rustic, earth-toned skirts and cardigans, scrawling something about wildflowers in her leatherbound notebook, emblazoned against the operatic white chalk cliffs being continually washed by the sparkling sapphire sea and not feel instantly soothed, regardless of what else is going on, in her life or yours.

Landscape is then not just backdrop, it is central to the film’s most potent attribute—its palliative effect on the weary and discontented viewer’s soul. Cunningham’s evocation of Summerland, as an oasis suspended in time, above and parallel to the conflicted world, where all pain is temporarily abolished, extends beyond how the film looks to how it feels, landing at this particular moment.

Like the floating islands that give it its name, Summerland hovers above real life without ever quite touching down. In the moments the film’s dramatic conflicts threaten to break through the amniotic stasis of its sun-drenched cinematography, romantic thematic pursuits, and effervescent dialogue, Swale vanishes the stakes. Only one line is spoken about what would have been the multiply illicit nature of Arterton and Mbatha-Raw’s relationship, for instance. “They think we should burn in hell,” Alice has to explain to Frank, who in all his totemic, childlike innocence, has managed somehow to avoid homophobic social inculcation. Never mind the fact that their relationship, in addition to being same sex, was cross racial. What would it have been like for Vera, as a woman-loving Black woman, to navigate a white ethno-nationalist empire during a time when homosexuality (though lesbianism was never targeted explicitly in the laws) was punishable by exile, hard labor, and even imprisonment? We can only imagine, because that’s not Summerland’s game.

Summerland isn’t a dirge-like, finger-wagging history lesson like The Imitation Game. Nor is it bright, confectionary, period-set escapism like Autumn de Wilde’s recent adaptation of Emma. It’s somewhere in between, more akin to Jonathan Levine’s Long Shot, which embraces contemporary cultural politics without really getting into them. The result is a kind of guilt-free indulgence in classical Hollywood narrative constructs, made possible not by inverting or deconstructing them, but by simply updating who gets to negotiate their terms. This sounds like criticism but I for one am fully on board. Long Shot was one of my favorite movies of last year, and Summerland is one of my favorite movies this year so far. There is a place for escapism with an ethical backbone. More than ever, we need to be able to relax under the spell of fantasists we can trust not to poison us with irony or distort history to suit their ideology. Spoiler alert, but Summerland has a happy ending. Would you expect that from a period film with an interracial lesbian couple at its center? You wouldn’t, but wouldn’t you like to?

copyright © 2020 Ryan Christopher Coleman

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“All goodness is in jeopardy”: Dead Girls at the End of the Decade

“As another year comes to pass, bringing another decade to pass, we find ourselves awash in the bodies of dead girls and women, fictional and very much real.”

This essay was originally set to be published in December 2019 on Much Ado About Cinema, to coincide with the premiere of Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin.

There is a film that premieres today, the last month of the decade, called Knives and Skin. Directed by Jennifer Reeder, the film depicts the surreal transformation a community undergoes when one of its own, a teenage girl named Carolyn Harper, goes missing and later shows up dead. Knives and Skin may in fact be this decade’s last work of art to employ a narrative device come lately to be known as the “dead girl trope.” This term refers to the use in story of this conceit—a beautiful, young, presumably innocent, usually white girl has gone missing or wound up dead (almost always murdered), plunging the incredulous family/community/town surrounding her into chaos and calling a charismatic detective to chase after answers.

Much lately has been made of the dead girl trope—researching its origins, examining its variations, interrogating its largely uncontested whiteness and cisness. Of course stories of dead and missing women have been around as long as women have died and gone missing, but since the early ‘90s the trope has clogged up the culture, and even moreso in the past decade. Every day we are inundated with stories of women battered, disappeared, manipulated, and killed. We cannot afford to be flip or numb, to treat these stories as just that—fiction, as anything separate from the culture they have a mutually parasitic relationship with. The most important question people have begun to ask of the dead girl trope is whether it has any capacity to attack the misogyny it depicts and uproot the racism and transphobia which support it. Or does recycling the trope again and again, even by creators with the most altruistic intentions, do anything other than entrench the idea that violence is the logical conclusion to the question of a woman?

As the final installment in a decade long saga of women on the verge, how does Knives and Skin measure up? To answer this question we have to do two things. We have to understand the real world stakes, and we have to go back to where this bad dream began.

“When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy.” -Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

As another year comes to pass, bringing another decade to pass, we find ourselves awash in the bodies of dead girls and women, fictional and very much real.

In the world, women are abducted, disappeared, if returned at all returned in bruised condition, mass graves are discovered, long buried reports of abuse are painfully unearthed, and women are killed. In Nigeria, in 2014, 276 schoolgirls abducted from the town of Chibok by Boko Haram and driven hundreds of miles into ungoverned territory. Five years on, 112 are still missing. Bereft parents have died waiting for their daughters to be returned. “Even in a hundred years,” one mother told a reporter from Al Jazeera this year, “we will keep believing that our daughters will return home.”

In Canada, after years of fierce organizing from within indigenous communities, the government finally launched an inquiry into the murder and disappearance of thousands of indigenous women stretching back decades. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, as it’s called, attribute it to "state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies.” Indigenous leaders name it: genocide.

In our own country, thousands of immigrant women are detained, many having fled their homes due to domestic violence, state-sponsored sexual violence and femicide only to wind up in dehumanizing internment, their children confiscated from them like personal effects. A rising number of mass shooters explicitly name the hatred of women as a call to action, their patterns of domestic abuse (86% of the 22 mass shooters analyzed in a recent Mother Jones report had demonstrable records) shored up too late. Trans women and gender non-conforming afab (assigned female at birth) people face an epidemic of transphobic, misogynistic, often racist violence from intimate partners and total strangers alike. Violence in the street is entrenched by the indifference of the state—of the 22 trans women murdered this year to date, 18 cases remain unsolved.

In the culture, the flood of women’s bodies rises from our ankles to our thighs. Scanning best of the decade lists—it’s easy to see if you’re looking, and even if you’re not, it’s hard to ignore—dead and missing girls are everywhere. Though the carnage is not distributed evenly across formats—there is for example a remarkable lack of dead girl stories in film when compared with the superabundance in television and podcasts—the sheer volume is staggering.

Podcasting emerged as the most exciting new storytelling medium this decade, transforming from local radio curio to culture-spanning phenomenon attracting big tech money and A-list celebrity buy-in. The medium, built on the backs of stories of dead and missing women, has proven unable to go on without them. The show that kickstarted the podcast revolution was Serial, a solemn journalistic inquiry into the unsolved murder of a teenage girl. Serial set off a true crime boom as much as it set a template for much of the medium. Though few shows have applied the same rigor to their dead, damaged, or missing subjects, none have needed to in order to become wildly popular. Simply put, there is no dead woman that eludes the reach of the podcaster, and without dead women, there would be no podcasts as we know them.

Finally, my god, television. It’s not that a number of the best shows of the decade centered on the story of a dead or missing girl; there were in fact so many they constituted a thematic center for the entire medium this decade—The Killing, The Fall, Broadchurch, Pretty Little Liars, How to Get Away With Murder, Making A Murderer, Top of the Lake, True Detective, The Night Of, and The Jinx, to name some of the heavy hitters.

One more show waded into the morass this decade, and most notably—it was the reason for all this mess in the first place.

David Lynch came back to television after 25 years with Twin Peaks: The Return, a third season to his legendary 1990 television series. By all accounts, those original eight episodes launched the beautiful dead girl craze we’re still in the vicious throes of. The entire Twin Peaks universe—Lynch and Mark Frost’s surprise smash first season, the meandering second season in which ABC rescinded creative control from Lynch because he refused to identify the dead girl in question’s killer, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch’s controversial 1992 feature prequel which features Laura Palmer, dead girl, as an alive protagonist rather than a silent mystery, the new season, and all the apocryphal literary spinoffs—centers on the beautiful, murdered, porcelain-white body of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, washed up on a riverbank in the pilot episode.

Every piece of writing on the dead girl trope addresses Lynch, if not exclusively, then in a fulsome manner. Alice Bolin, who published a comprehensive book of essays on the trope last year called Dead Girls: Surviving an American Obsession, first engaged with the subject in a 2014 essay on Twin Peaks for the Los Angeles Review of Books. And indeed, nearly every review of Knives and Skin I encountered while researching for this essay references Twin Peaks as an obvious ancestor to Reeder’s film.

Why? The aesthetic comparisons are evident—moody score, weird acting, woodsy small town setting, beautiful missing, and then dead, girl. But the comparison is broader than that. It’s almost compulsory, unavoidable. The impact Twin Peaks had on culture is impossible to understate. But the depth to which the twin images of Laura Palmer’s ghostly, smiling, peroxide and permed homecoming photo and her dead, drowned, blue-faced and plastic-wrapped crime scene photo, which the show flashes to in alternation, have seeped into our core imagining of what women fundamentally are in life and in death has absolutely not been reckoned with.

This Knives and Skin grasps. The film’s Laura Palmer, called Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley), behaves much in the same way. In her first and only alive scene, she and a boy drive up to the shore of a lake at night. Without knowing anything about the film the first time I watched it, I tensed, anticipating exactly what ended up happening. Carolyn and the boy, Andy (Ty Olwin), walk from the car to the lakeside, silhouetted in the glare of the headlights. Before kissing, the two bicker about Carolyn’s glasses, whether they should stay on or be taken off. Andy says “keep ‘em on, I don’t care.” Carolyn responds: “I do care. I actually don’t want to see what’s about to happen.” The next time anyone in the film sees Carolyn, she’s dead.

If Knives and Skin does anything perfectly it’s this. The Laura Palmers of fiction and the Laura Palmers in fact, all around the world, have fused, like the twin images in Twin Peaks—alive: radiant, dead: serene, and in both cases speechless, compliant. It recalls Maggie Nelson’s question after seeing Hitchcock’s Vertigo: “whether women were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.”

An avatar of young womanhood as always arcing toward extermination has emerged with a juggernaut’s relentlessness out of the scrum of the past three decades of dead girl TV. The characters in Knives and Skin live in this world. Carolyn Harper knows what happens to Carolyn Harpers. She doesn’t want to see “what’s about to happen” because she’s powerless to prevent it. The tagline of the film, “Have you seen Carolyn Harper?” lands as a joke by the end of the film. Carolyn Harpers are all we ever see.

Knives and Skin doesn’t so much rage with righteous injustice over the unfair and unthinkable death of one young girl as it does turn the palpable, ten-ton heavy despair of unfair and unthinkable death as the condition of young girls back on the viewer. “You guys doing okay,” Carolyn’s mother asks three of her daughters classmates who’ve brought her condolence casseroles. Carolyn’s body has just been discovered. An ice cream cake made for her birthday melts into a pale pool of sludge on the table before her. “Yes,” they say, emotionless. “You lying?” They nod again, “yes.”

Reeder has taken us back to the world of Twin Peaks in a time where dead girls are taken for granted, taken as givens. They still, however, even in this most melancholy meditation, destroy communities and upend lives. I’ve said that Knives and Skin doesn’t rage with injustice over the death of Carolyn Harper. But should it?

The reference point that floated into my head while watching Knives and Skin the first time, that I couldn’t shake the second time was not Twin Peaks, but its much maligned and misunderstood prequel, Fire Walk With Me. Lynch made Fire Walk With Me after Bob Iger and ABC tried to stage manage the surprise success of season 1 by forcing him to reveal Laura’s killer. “‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ was a question that we did not ever really want to answer,” Lynch later told TV Guide. Season 2, largely without Lynch, was as a result baffling, anticlimactic and sensational in all the wrong places. The show was cancelled less than two years after debuting. Fire Walk With Me was a vengeance quest, Lynch’s intent to bring closure and justice to the story of a Pandora he had never intended to let out of the box.

Fire Walk With Me is brutal. Its examination of trauma is surgical, uncompromising, and to the bone. For the majority of the film the camera is glued to Laura, who walks, talks, dances, laughs, gobbles like a turkey, screams, cries, and eventually dies. As a spectator you are shoved in close proximity to Laura. Unlike the silent, pliant Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks, Sheryl Lee’s Laura in Fire Walk With Me is fully alive, every fantasy concocted about her by the characters in season 1 as well as the fans in the audience is in sharp, contested relief. She feels everything done to her immediately, unbearably, and so do you.

Many critics hated Fire Walk With Me, and it was a commercial flop. The film was booed at Cannes. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Everything about David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a deception. It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be.” In a discussion on the dead girl trope for The New Republic, Sarah Marshall offered a remark that speaks directly to the film’s icy reception: “a dead woman is utterly incapable of offering up even the most cursory contradiction to the narratives that entomb her as readily as any casket.” Fire Walk With Me was one huge, bleeding contradiction.

The original bad dream, the dead girl’s nightmare we still haven’t woken up from was actually unpacked all those years ago, just months after it all began. Laura’s killer was her father, Leland. Her father had been sexually abusing her since she was a child, her mother knew, and within hours of Laura finally perceiving this fact in its full reality, he killed her. All of the weirdness, the quirkiness, and horror of Twin Peaks, along with the enduring, eroticized, and profitable trope it popularized emanates from this very personal, achingly common story of childhood sexual abuse. Is it any wonder people hated it? Or why the Laura Palmer of the original series is the figure we’ve chosen to preserve, pressed flat into the pages of culture forever?

“All goodness is in jeopardy,” the Log Lady warns Laura before entering the roadhouse where her life will begin to tailspin before its eventual crash. This is the essence and the power of the dead girl story. Though we have erected a world that is impossible for women to navigate unscathed, we continue to vest them with the symbolic responsibility of innocence. As if Laura’s singular life was the first domino in a chain that led to the unraveling of the entire world. But wasn’t it? 

Many have pointed out the racial and gender-specific freighting of the dead girl trope. Could Laura Palmer have been Latinx? How would the movie change if Carolyn Harper had been African-American, or trans? The answer on every level, symbolic and real, is drastically. What these depictions unconsciously reflect is the priceless value of white life. Imagine an entire town shutting down operations to mourn and search for a missing black trans woman? We can’t, because when trans women are murdered the only efforts to organize and demonstrations of rage come from within queer communities, often queer communities of color, who have historically adverse relationships with law enforcement. Black women face an escalated threat of violence due to the interlocking forces of white supremacy and misogyny. Yet the disappearance and death of black women and other women of color have historically never been met with the same uproar as with white women who meet the same ends.

It’s not that Knives and Skin is a failure because it seems more interested in the aesthetic allure of a dead girl than in drumming up indignation for the circumstances that configured her death. And it’s not that Twin Peaks was a failure because it prioritized white and cis tragedy over all others. Both Reeder and Lynch have done something profound when it comes to thinking and feeling through trauma, sexual violence, and grief. What remains important is to ask is whether each successive appearance of the dead girl trope is amounting to something, not on the individual but on the collective level. As Bolin has written, “It becomes harder and harder to subvert something that’s been used so many times.”

Have we seemed to make much progress from Fire Walk With Me to Knives and Skin? Honestly, no. But have the horrors real world misogynistic, racist, transphobic violence ceased? Even if rates of violent crime are in fact down in the United States, one disappearance or death like the kinds depicted in Lynch and Reeder’s work would be too many. The most successful iterations of the dead girl trope have grappled with these tough, interceding concerns, like race—consider Top of the Lake and The Night Of. The least successful amount merely to prodding a dead woman’s body with a stick just to see how it feels—consider every episode of My Favorite Murder. The most that I can hope is that future creators considering employing the dead girl trope take the long view of all that came before and ask, is it worth it? Does the dead girl in my story deserve this? What kind of justice, in fact, does she deserve?

copyright © 2019 Ryan Christopher Coleman

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“Firebird” | excerpt II

“Mom I’m sorry,” Margaret managed to heave. “I’m so sorry, I hate myself.” This isn’t what she meant to say. There was more that was supposed to follow, but the trueness of it rang out so abruptly and completely that it deafened Margaret to her own thoughts. Composure dribbled out of her like piss. She propped herself up on an elbow and brushed the hair off her face.

Impulsively she called her mother. She was sprawled on her bed like a spider crushed into a corner. Outside it was dark, hot, cloudless. She wore black sweatpants and a big gray t-shirt that was somehow also skimpy. Her wet hair had dried into a tangled mat.

She clutched the phone to her face as if it was a precious treasure, as if it was dying. Hot tears flowed from her eyes and soaked the bed. She had drank too much coffee, she hated Jana. She was terrified sick of spending another night in her apartment alone. It became clearer then than ever before how she hated her job. Margaret felt her hate. She felt along the contours of her degradation like a blind woman making out a face with her hands. The humiliation spackled onto her like a cast, fossilizing her inside a tomb of mistakes that in the moment always felt out of her control. 

Margaret hummed to herself on the way home from work earlier that day. Tapped her fingers along the wheel, turned on the radio, searched for songs to sing along with, found none. She paid close attention to traffic and to other commuters, scraped gunk off the head of the gearshift with her jagged pinky nail. She zoned out, fell into daydreams, and had visions of a sort at work not infrequently. It would happen on her lunch break, definitely, but also at her desk on slower days, or days where she had less energy, drank less coffee. But the images she saw that day were different. They came through along a frequency that she couldn’t tune out. Margaret carefully probed the images pressed into her mind as not to dislodge them, for fear they may gasp into form again. She felt, if not a permanence, an endurance to them deeper than was normal. Deeper or perhaps longer—they stretched back toward Margaret knew of course what, but not which details in particular. Please, not this again. She shook her head and scratched her hair, hurried home and vowed silence, peace for the remainder of the evening. 

When her mother picked up Margaret let out a screeching groan like the chassis of a truck dragging along the ground.

“Margaret what is happening? Margaret honey what happened?”

Words weren’t coming, she screamed more.

“You have to tell me what is going on Margaret. Did something happen?”


“Happen” was inflected in a way that made it feel like a sinkhole. “Did anything really happen,” is how it sounded. “Happen” threatened to engulf Margaret in self doubt but she evaded, leaping over it.

“Mom I’m sorry,” Margaret managed to heave. “I’m so sorry, I hate myself.” This isn’t what she meant to say. There was more that was supposed to follow, but the trueness of it rang out so abruptly and completely that it deafened Margaret to her own thoughts. Composure dribbled out of her like piss. She propped herself up on an elbow and brushed the hair off her face. 

She went to speak but thought her mom was about to speak so she stayed silent. She began to realize how much she had already said. 

“Okay, Margaret. Take a breath. Okay.”


What she said comforted and reassured, but how she sounded was something else. In just three words Margaret’s mother achieved a gradation of tones specially arranged to triangulate Margaret in a disempowering rut, like a car beached on a bank of mud desperately turning its tires, only getting more stuck. Margaret’s mother was a master of a kind of neutralizing tonal hypnosis that worked like the devil on Margaret.

“I’m sorry honey.”

“Can I just ask you like two questions?” 

Margaret was exhausted but her desperation still came across as toothy and alive. 

“Why don’t you tell me about your day, Margaret? Why don’t we get your brother on the phone?”



“He makes me sick!”



“Mary Margaret,” was her mother’s curt reply.



Margaret was silent, which was a reply. Her mother didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” sniffed Margaret, communicating composure, a redrawing of the lines. “That’s all I need.” Clearing of a throat, nose wipe, pause. “Maybe I will talk to Brian.”



“Yes, that’s good.”

“Maybe I’ll ask him about that time I ripped the door off the pantry. Brian had my legs, Dad had his arms around my waist and they pulled, and I held on, and you were crying, and I won.” Silence. “Or how during that time, on the night they found Celia, when those cops carried me off the highway one of them put his whole hand on my crotch.”



“Margaret, Jesus. Jesus.”

Margaret wiped a cold tear from her eye in silence, looked from one end of the room to the other.

“I got diagnosed today.”



“What?”

She twirled a long strand of hair, dropped it, examined her fingers, and then flung her hair off the side of the bed, shifting to her back to look up at the ceiling. “They said I have endometriosis.” She became almost perky. “They have to do something called a laparoscopy on me. Which is basically like an ultrasound, except there’s no baby inside me, just cancer, or something dead. They have to cut—“ She abruptly stopped talking.



“Oh my god, honey.”

Her hair hung from the bed like a stiff ribbon of plastic sheeting. She wiggled her toes daintily like she’d just gotten a pedicure she was trying to dry.

“Why are you telling me like this?”

Margaret felt a stab of guilt which she instantly resented. 

“This is what you’re upset about,” her mother said breathlessly yet almost clicking her tongue. Margaret’s resentment ossified into rage, which dropped her back through the ages.

“Christ mom,” she huffed, threateningly, until a sudden, deep sadness bubbled into her throat, stunning her. She proceeded numbly, distracted by the search for the firm indignation she felt moments before, “that’s not what I’m upset about,” and a hot cry finally eked out, “at all.”

Her mother gently exhaled. 

“I don’t care about my uterus.” The cry engorged and burst into sobs. Margaret’s words walloped out with the force of hailstones.  “I want to know what happened to my friend.”

“You know what happened to her.”

“I don’t know anything that’s happened. I can’t remember anything. It’s like she never came back, it’s like she did die, and I died, but only inside. My body is living, my blood is pumping, signals are firing, but inside is just dead. My soul is like roadkill banging around inside an empty tomb!”

On the other end of the line her mother was silent, stunned. Now she’s listening, Margaret thought.

“I can’t get back to it … I mean, yes, I know what happened. But what I felt, what I went through, and what she went through, it doesn’t match up.” A cry choked her. She coughed it out, sat up so fast she almost heaved. “It wasn’t the same after she came back. Of course it wasn’t. But it didn’t go anywhere else either. It never got better. When she was taken part of me went with her, but when she came back,” powerful feeling gripped Margaret, she cried openly. “It wasn’t with her. She didn’t bring it back.” Margaret buried her face in the wrinkled comforter and dragged the tears off on it. “I’ve just never felt something like that. I sometimes think,” she ventured, warily, “terrible … I sometimes think if I was raped I would wake up, in a way. I’d be able to connect these two parts of my life, which are so separate,” tears flowed again up the well but the prickly, icy loss mixed with a new, sudden, and thawing relief. No doubt the words to her mother sounded old, but to Margaret the logic to them was new, startling her heart with hope. “Know what I mean?” 

“Mom?”

At what point Margaret’s mother hung up, she wasn’t sure. Margaret held the phone away from her face, eyes wide and mouth agape. She dropped it in disbelief. It landed face up and she threw her pillow down over it as if the connection hadn’t gone dead but instead on the other line Margaret’s mother had swapped out with a dark, voyeuristic god of shame now peering through the black, eating her humiliation, licking his teeth bared huge in a wicked grin of gluttony. Margaret’s muttered words spiked the night: “oh my god.” 

copyright © 2018 Ryan Christopher Coleman

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“Firebird” | excerpt

“She tried to put all the extra words she spoke to him into the chamber with the rage but could not. They were free.“

“Do you like tuna fish?”

Margaret was sitting on a bench right outside work, eating a sandwich. She looked up, startled. As she registered who spoke she unthinkingly wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

“Do I what?” 

“Isn’t that a tuna sandwich?”

It was Bill, a man that she worked with.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes?” She replied in the same tone without thinking. He did not change his carriage but she could tell something inside him went cold. He smiled a flat line with just his lips, bowed his head and began to step backwards when Margaret, compelled by panic and embarrassment, blurted out, “Yeah, it’s tuna. I stopped eating it for a little while after Fukushima. You know the nuclear… reactor, after that earthquake. The typhoon, I mean the tsunami in Japan.” She didn’t break eye contact but swallowed dryly, a ragged edge of crust tracing a line down her throat like the long and gnarled finger of death.

“I saw a chart once, it was round, like an infographic, with illustrations, and it was concentric circles that showed different groups of sea life and how they ingest and metabolize radioactive materials.” She blinked. He didn’t move. “You know when the towers, or, whatever, the nuclear structure fell into the sea. Well all that stuff goes somewhere.” She paused for many seconds. “Tuna are one of the fish that metabolize and store high levels of active radiation. They’re really not very good to eat. But I don’t know. I saw that chart so long ago, and it’s such a good source of protein.”

Bill laughed, a little too heartily. It started out genuine but he overextended its reach. Margaret felt a little ashamed and wondered why.

“Um,” he said, searching. Bill too paused. “Do you normally eat lunch out here?” he asked.

Margaret was terrified that he kept the conversation going. She felt like she had been walking a tightrope and was reaching the end. There was no rooftop on the other side, just an end of rope.

 “Yeah sometimes.”

“Maybe I’ll bring my stuff down here for lunch later this week.”

“Okay!” It was a calculated concession. She might have to eat lunch with Bill at some point, but her “okay” dismissed him faster than anything else would. He was already walking on light feet back through the sliding doors. “Fucking pervert,” she thought.

Margaret was falling.

She forced her eyes open, swung the lids up heavy as anvils, and smoothed the side of her hair. The touch unexpectedly continued, becoming a caress that reached down to her thigh. She cupped the top of her thigh and smoothed out her skirt, shifting her weight from right to left, and then right again as if untangling an invisible knot that laid beneath her, which was the source of all her discomfort. As she smoothed the agitation swelled, and when it crashed it became an enthralling mix of excitement and disgust.

“Tuna fucking fish, I’ll show you…” Margaret trailed off, realizing as she spoke that she had gone too far. There was no one else around so she sat still, holding the sandwich with both hands, letting the rage inside her coil back up and deposit itself into its chamber. Beneath the rage there was an embarrassment of smaller emotions. It felt like a long time since she had spoken to anyone, aside from clerks at the store, her family, people at work about work things. Bill didn’t matter. His stupid laugh nonetheless confirmed to Margaret what a fuck up she’d made. It’s like he knew when he burst out laughing, though what she said was funny, there was no way to laugh purely with her, that some amount was at her expense. She tried to put all the extra words she spoke into the chamber with the rage but could not. They were free. She ate the rest of her sandwich in silence, an atonement for speech, feeling them go. The words left trails that tickled her face and the feeling was shame. 

copyright © 2018 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[ryanccoleman]

“My Very Own House on a Hill” | part I

“The smile spread across across my face like a cat stretching its back under the sun.“

I drove past my very own house on a hill for the third or fourth time this past Sunday night.

It was raining that night for the first time in months. I was in my car. I sat idling before a single pin of light, bathed in red, and slowly closed my eyes. Purple-red, bruisy and dark. In my mind, a picture of the bulb still blazed.

The bulb was incandescent. I knew because incandescent bulbs still line that street. To the south, a downward, rolling expanse of LED, leading to the heart of the built-up part of the city. To the north, dusky patches of near-city suburbia suffused with the orange glow of incandescence so thick it’s almost palpable. Like the night is a glass surface the light sweat onto.

I also knew because I felt it. The tungsten filament in incandescent bulbs irradiates the light it produces. When heated the light swirls like smoke, clogging the air, beyond the threshold of optic comprehension. That night the light broke over my face like fresh water. Descending vapors burned off like will-o-wisps, anodizing as they fell, evaporating, eventually sizzling to a pop like bacon fat in the grooves of the asphalt.

This isn’t fully true but my face did begin to fry like a mudfish, curling up in points at the edges. This isn’t true either. I smiled with my lips closed. The smile spread across across my face like a cat stretching its back under the sun.

The light turned green. My whole body shifted into drive, punching forward.

It was at that time I responded to the call of the house.

copyright © 2017 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[ryanccoleman]

“My Very Own House on a Hill” | part VII

“Descending the hill, my only thought: ‘I feel like this was inevitable.’”

I wonder at what point this became something I did. The scene keeps replaying in my mind. The house passing by slowly with unbearable intensity. What it feels like is gravity, which is hard to explain. When I saw the house my reaction was to laugh. A single, sharp exhale, and then nothing at all. It passed by me like a wheel on fire. I dazzled in the blaze, sure I wouldn’t get hurt, but felt a tinge of horror to think where it came from. 

Descending the hill, my only thought: “I feel like this was inevitable.”

The rest of the ride is a blur, but I can guess the route I took: I connected with the main north-south drag that flushes into my neighborhood. To get there, more blind turns away from the house. Eventually a liminal sign, something on the border with this neighborhood and everything else. One is Catholic school that lies right on the edge. The main building is white with sky blue doors. The trees out front have bright green leaves. In spring, the leaves turn the color of lemons. Other trees in this neighborhood: cypress, laurel, nectarine, plum. Various kinds of palm. Less lush: gray trees with brittle leaves I don’t know the name for. All sorts of bushes. When there are flowers, for one season they are purple, and another they are white.

The sidewalks even out again. They ride close to the road. The road here is better paved. A train runs through this area and everywhere I crisscross the tracks. I park close enough, almost four blocks away. I don't think while walking. I empty out my mind so I can hear everything. Headphones in so no one will bother me, head lowered, but not enough to convey total absorption — a vulnerability. I don’t convey toughness, either, which is enough to provoke many men. Also because I’m not tough. What I listen to instead — a breeze rushing through the trees. Electricity running through the wires. People up at all hours in this neighborhood. I listen to them, but don’t pry. The fullest sound I hear comes from my feet. Grass, pavement, dirt, gravel. I trace the wall with one finger separating this alley from a carwash, gravel under my feet. Crunching. Two block to my home.

I don’t know if a light was on in the house, but this time I noticed it has shingles. I ascertained the details with vivid clarity. While I walk, I run through the image again and again: intricately grooved, the way the slow drip of runoff creates canyons out of rocks. A record of time passing by the house as texture, in the rest of the neighborhood, runoff. Canyons at the heart of the city. The shingles were thick as banana peels and I imagined just as soft. Like the entire house is just a membrane, thin as a moth’s wing.

There’s a transformer on the ground. It exploded several nights ago and now lies here, untouched. I stop before it. There’s less than a foot between me and its broad, black side. Somehow we haven’t been without electricity. I think maybe the transformer was a dummy that simply fell like a ripe fruit. Electricity coming from somewhere else.

At the moment my rear tires met the road that connects to the house, I clicked out of the disjuncture I felt at the coffee shop. I didn’t click back to how I felt before, but into something else. Not entirely new, and not more deeply disjointed, but a disjuncture still, slightly shifted. I remember feeling this for the first time as a kid. I crouched in the alley made by the east fence of my yard, wood, and the west fence of the huge lot that then stood empty, chain link. A three-house-deep run of land that belonged to no one. I liked to stand stiff with my hands up, back against my fence and facing the gate, through that, the field. I imagined myself as a suspect in a round-up, or suspended in something like amber. The point was that I was somehow trapped, and on view, like a butterfly on a pinboard. I had crouched down to investigate the assortment of crunchy, discarded plant parts and received a sudden shock from my foot. A thorn was embedded in my sole. It was easy to extract but the experience left me exhausted. I remember being in a blank state for what felt like too long. Even at a young age I knew my body’s response was too much for that relatively low amount of trauma, but nothing could be done. I waited for the clouds to pass, and when they did, I felt another way. Not the way I felt before the thorn. This startled me, but again, that feeling soon got sucked into the vacuum that replaced feeling inside me. Somewhere I imagine all these feelings pinned, one on top of another, light filtering through hundreds of pairs of wings, beating, interrupted, creating a color that is muddy, creating a movement that is subtle, explosive.

copyright © 2017 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[ryanccoleman]

“one of the real ones”

“how can i not be doing this to myself?”

how can i not be doing this to myself?



reading Mary Gaitskill, over 100 pages just tonight

she writes:
 there is nothing like physical pain for enlarging and enhancing free floating emotional pain

my dad gives me a massive knife for christmas and three months later i slice myself open i bleed into the sink for an hour while listening to NPR

civilians in Syria are being gassed by their own government and i’m still crying over being raped 7 years ago

i’m still crying over a cut on my finger

you’re so cute
 a man tells me outside a clinic

i’m blocks from my car, it’s the middle of the day

I would like, rape the shit out you

i stand in one place and laugh, my laugh is huge

later on instagram a man who i asked to fuck me while i slept posts a picture with his arm slung brotherly around the shoulder of a man who roofied the friend of a friend and left her passed out, idling in a car in a park in Alhambra.

one of the real ones the caption says. i close out the app, put my phone in the glove compartment, and drive home.

copyright © 2018 Ryan Christopher Coleman from BOY RAPE

[ryanccoleman]

“Celluloid”

“what does it mean for something you hate to be violated?“

i’m always fine this late at night

magic hour past midnight alone and walking

I clutch my bag, a manic woman, imagine myself in celluloid as a manic woman, clutching

when a jolt of vibrant pain cracks inside me like lightning, ripping as it branches

something is insistent on reminding me of the body I’ve been shellacked into

what does it mean for something you hate to be violated?

it’s still yours

celluloid cranks, the reel sputters, alights for a moment and then belches into flame

the body of the stock disintegrates but images pierce the mind like a putty knife in drywall

when I’m dead I’ll still remember the first time I saw someone get raped in the movies.

copyright © 2018 Ryan Christopher Coleman from BOY RAPE

[ryanccoleman]

“Civilization”: a History in Four Parts

“Rex Reed says: she asked for more sympathy than we could afford to give her

Judy herself says: I don’t know how to fight like a man. I’m not supposed to know how.”

“New Netherland Colony Court dispatches late spring, 1646”

one Negro and one other boy, Congo (of Congo, MAN-u-elle Congo) this crime being condemned of God (CONGO) an abomination, a (blackberry, a pimple, thickening on a thorny vine) the rationale cited … Genesis, Leviticus this prisoner, this (dove cooing out “FIL-THEE-NESS”) sentenced to stand, public execution and there choked, and there burnt to ashes, cut out from him the cord vibrating “me”

O, New Haven wring me out, stretch me like dough and staple me to the roof of heaven I am one revolution of the wheel away, and two shy of surviving this body yet tenderly cauterized, I scab— while the flesh of the colony grows fresh, pinky-white around me I remain, mutilated and brown, a blemish on time, blessing the tongue that licks me blessing the cord that whips me dismantled, dispersed, and wed to the wind till I scatter and settle and see you again.

”Jonathan”

after the long night, after the weeks of probes and prodding, the swirling circus animals like shooting stars caught in the drip drop halo around my head, after the namelessness, after the inversion but before my sleep came the dreaming,

my bounty, my burning breast, the shivering remainder of my fitful, fruitless days, the enumerated particles that cover me, concealing the real me—black and bodiless as the night re-constituted, reduced to and entombed by an asterisk on a set of data:

MISSISSIPPI STATE INSANE HOSPITAL at WHITFIELD /colored /convicted of CROSS-DRESSING /convicted of EROTOMANIA /convicted of INCOHERENCY

dreams— my vision of the world on fire

“Manhattan”

June on Manhattan island, it is medium hot, a calm sun in the bank of the sky, 1969, almost precisely the middle of the year,

on the Upper East Side, a crowd collects outside a chapel, humming, electricity hums above but imperceptibly, thick rubber glommed over bony silver wires,

Lauren Bacall steps out of a courtesy vehicle, she is wearing a dark linen shirtdress, she peers at the silver watch worn on her left wrist to deflect the gaze of the crowd but is drawn to the humming wires: she thinks, how thick they look as if made of flesh, whipping cords stuck, drawn, and threaded together by pulsing, human sinew

Later uptown there is to be a parade for the most beautiful women and girls of one neighborhood from 1-2pm, ending in a reception where a half-dozen of them will stand, one foot across the other like a T-bone steak, cradling bundles of roses, each wearing a big plastic smile and in dresses of pink, yellow, and seafoam like a row of easter eggs, expectant, tampered with yet still, uncracked

Even later, in the still light of an expressionless moon a brick is thrown at a cop and it hits him;

this precious second; the quiet whirr of matter traveling through space, the soft padding of vitrified clay against cheap polyester, the clattering of the brick against the ground, inaudible over the fracas of the inaugural Stonewall riot, the noon bells at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, Atlantic waves lapping at the feet of burning sodomites, the conduction of the evolution of the humanizing mind does not complete its circuit

Rex Reed says: “she asked for more sympathy than we could afford to give her”

Judy herself says: “I don’t know how to fight like a man. I’m not supposed to know how.”

“Night”

in my dreams there is one soft shade— grey is how it feels but warmer, with infinite variation.

I traverse an abandoned downtown maze toward no destination in particular—

in these dreams, there is no toward.

there are no people either but I do have company. the moon above me and the telephone wires beneath her, now silent—the nervous system of a dead person.

I am on 3rd (or is it 2nd?) crossing Broadway, I am doing a two-step and I am evaporating, I look to my left, say goodbye to this flank, I look right, say goodbye to her as well

I think, easing on down, the way I am through this city of doubles drinking the double draught: nostalgia, amnesia, nostalgia, amnesia, my arms moving upward and out wobbling along my horizontal axis I must look like a scarecrow puffy at the chest, coal eyes, stitched mouth, a proper man.

how amusing, how useless I think, as I soft-shoe out of my own body

copyright © 2018 Ryan Christopher Coleman Platform Review, issue 2

[ryanccoleman]

“Who is Manuel La Prima?”

"I say: you’re the villain she says: even I forget you”

I.

Chuck and Charity and Alanna and Bill were all dancers I knew, I lived off Townsend above a little supper club, I would have tomato soup and pickle-relish sandwiches on the narrow cracked-top bread you could get at a baker’s on 7th, I could only spend around 25 dollars a week at that time or so I thought, not knowing how expensive cigarettes were going to get or how many cab rides Alanna was going to have to pay for me, fumbling for a wallet— thats a folded receipt, not a wallet, that’s some fucking cocktail napkin I’m still holding, clutching at it, eyes dilating, back in a woman’s arms again like a child, at every age women are called upon like this.

At the hospital on the TV, the snakes came to Spain, the snakes came to San Leandro

II.

The waters are poisoned 
it was murmured but it runs counter to the water, it moves by way of the moon, tangled up in comet tails between here and the edge of what as a kid you looked up at through squinted eyes and believed you saw — a kind of crease that told you you will die in a way Mr. Smallwood couldn’t when he showed you how skin could sink and crack like drying mud, when you got your first paper cut and it was so deep that it didn’t bleed, your flesh left out like a piece of cheese, hardening, hugging its vanishing moisture close to core I feel her, weeding with her left hand and sowing with her right, the executioner’s daughter sat across six rivers in an untidy bib I say: you’re the villain she says: even I forget you— I feel her lips moving against my throat, red posies form, out of my mouth “an ancient salutation” in neither her language nor mine:

dieu vous garde des mains

III.

it didn’t matter if it killed one or a hundred that year, “god keeps you with his hands” Luc told me at the bookshop, wiping my nose on an unraveling red sleeve, it might be “blesses you” he called after me, hurrying out onto Lafayette, the sun branded the bay that afternoon and I kept indoors to avoid facing any of it it could be “with my hands” he would tell me again, later, at a point where I had moved past distinctions between God, death, and killer, smiling up at Luc, smiling at Manuela, I patted his face with the inside of my left hand



—they might as well pile us on a barge and float us around in the bay

smoking slims on the patio, tuning out the hum, a calculation we all feel, bodies slid along the bars to make sense of Jonny having to give away his closing shift because he cant be on his feet that long anymore, and Carlito, who hasn’t been to a Wednesday night in over a month,

a city on a hill, surrounded on all sides by the tip of a knife

—that would make it harder for the vultures, he said, not easier

IV.

all that’s left— a rattlesnake tail, a clove, a charred page “who is manuel la prima?” like a point of data blown off axis

I think the point is the question, or the question is beside the point.

I’m at my hill, bare feet in the grass dandelions but no bees, moon in full swing against the sun, as quiet as a blast zone up here, I’m looking straight down Market to the water, a couple buses tracing lines, ready to diverge at 6th, Nina’s flower shop and 
 Hattie’s apartment above it, the roof above that, with pots and pots of flowers, the skylight crudely stained by the kids at Project One, autobody shops, lights still on in a gyro shop, next to a bookshop which used to be narrow apartments where a guy I knew Gene lived, the remnants of a fire on Hallam, I’m lying back now, see past the stars, fold my body at the middle,

in any language it’s still the same, crying because kids shouldn’t die on the street.

V.

and that it had never occurred to me until then— dove descending, the blue fairy in an idiotic crown, mumbling nursery rhymes, I wave the remote at her but instead turn up my insides, pink, blue, and purple, I blink like I’m changing the channel but she's still there, hovering drunkenly she says:
 I am Manuella and I think that’s not what 
I want to hear right now, cross my arms in my heart to think of myself that way, that I’d never thought of other gay people as friends.

the fairy reaches down, traces a lesion on my cheek with her left hand 

I open the book at my bedside and record: 
“applesauce, 2 spoonfuls”

copyright © 2018 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[ryanccoleman]

“Babyface”

“I laugh because I know it’s stupid to dream about the past, but I don’t care, because I’m happy.“

Walking south, Fair Oaks Avenue. Pasadena, just after 7. It’s fall, and the sun is already setting in the west, but it’s still warm. The summer bakes Southern California so relentlessly that we feel the effects for months afterward. Even in November, which it is now, I imagine that if I got down on my hands and knees and pressed my ear to the ground, I could hear the anticipatory drops of Winter rain sizzling into steam, and feel them rising, up out of the cracks, meeting my cheek like warm breath, the heat dying, but still glowing deep underground.

But I don’t kneel down. I don’t press my face flat against the asphalt in the street, or the stones that make up the sidewalk. That is something a crazy person would think to do, and today I am not crazy. Today I am all ease. I don’t fight today—against other people, against my body, against the sun. I don’t ask why I am all ease today. To ask why today I fit in and don’t have to fight would be as useless as asking why on the days I fight. Because I don’t believe in the God I was raised with anymore, and because I haven’t taken the time to look into any others, for now, I am who is left to answer these questions. Of course I’m inadequate, but I’m not mysterious, which is enough of a consolation. When it comes to matters such as these, I’ve come not to ask. Just be grateful, enjoy the breeze.

Ease, walking past the Hookah Lounge, ease walking past Bank of the West. I am wearing comfortable pants and a comfortable shirt today. I look like a boy, which disappoints me but does permit less visibility. There are so few people out today, on this Sunday. I feel like a ghost. I finger a button at my waist, not at the fly but set off from the center, a button for suspenders to loop around. The button is so firmly stitched into the pants that I feel the shape of my flesh beneath it and I grimace, imagining the body I hate that is as obstinate as the button.

I dart my eyes as a mechanical response to self-hate, causing my attention to divert in suit. Across the street is an old theater. It used to be called “The Rialto” before it shut down. The name still coronates its three marquees, which are adjoined, facing east, southeast, and northeast. I approach the Rialto and look up. The sky past the marquee is a complicated color. It is as blue, as it is violet, as it is gray. It is so much each of these colors that it is not any one of them, anymore. A better way of describing it: so tender, set against the thick white lines of the marquee, and the red letters inside the marquee, which spell:

“BABYFACE THE LADY EVE 730P 11P”

along with the bulbs which line the marquee, translucent, that each bear a filament at their center, setting off the red with a brilliant gold, that I’m filled with a powerful, sentimental emotion. The emotion drains the color from me and my surroundings. It is the same autumn night, but set against a contrast of the past. Where my reality and hallucination meet, there is friction, and the static sound cannonading from the collision of two irreconcilable ways of being in the world frees me from pain.

I laugh because I know it’s stupid to dream about the past, but I don’t care, because I’m happy. My gray body is warm, cloaked in a long, new, tweed jacket of my invention. The glossy red, wicked, pointy nails at the end of my elegant fingers, thick-boned, flesh as sweet and simple as poundcake, take hold of my collar, pulling the coat closer around me and against the wind, now swirling and buffeting me, an invention also. I continue to face the marquee. The city is quieter than ever. “Ease,” my body thinks out loud. White light pours out of the marquee. I mouth: “baby face,” and let my face remain in its upturned position as my eyes fully relinquish focus. This is romance. And no one has to touch me. I enter the theater.

copyright © 2017 Ryan Christopher Coleman published in the Anti-Languorous Project, no. 2, Fall 2018

[ryanccoleman]

“I buy a nail polish”

“hunger for love is not as strong as love itself, but even then I make it carry me— what else?“

I’m at Target and I’m half high, clutching nail polishes in my fists like barbed wire, brass knuckles out of their applicators

I’m absolutely cavernous for love though somehow I don’t remember it, it passes through my sky as wisp as breath, hunger for love is not as strong as love itself, but even then I make it carry me— what else? a loss of twoness, more on that — the severed umbilical connection — like a loss of God, a guiding disbelief that sees emptiness where there could be spark, you unlearn the fear of emptiness and make it a religion.

copyright © 2017 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[ryanccoleman]

“Clean One”

“I told Amy to empty her mind but she told me she couldn’t:
 ‘reverberations’

‘there is something inextinguishable that remains.’”

I.

Amy talks about the humming— the low humming

siren on the rocks, looking down the sunset like the barrel of a gun, ten ships in the harbor, one unmoored at sea reef below rocks cut kicking feet, there are no bloodstains underwater.

I told Amy to empty her mind but she told me she couldn’t:
 reverberations

there is something inextinguishable that remains.

one clean one, he took it off the hip one bad one, back to normal again.

II.

I deal cards in a dark bar, dark wood everywhere— the carpet is green, like we’re all silver needles inside a sewing box the jukebox crooning:

do I have power? I want the power.
 do I have power?
 I want the power.

wheaty taste floods my mouth I deal, hypnotized we’re drawn into a gyre, a slow crawl around the circumference of how very little $10 an hour affords a person germ, flax, mustard seed, turn on the sink in the back before you throw up.

Later, the drive home, later, the shadow of love

one clean one, he took what I could give, one bad one, choked on
 what I won’t admit.

III.

my back on the glass— hands up the curse moving through me, wet and under the surface the water moves through me

I’m in it

peachy pink bliss casket Bohemian Roco- co vintage jewel case words for sale sliding out of the pages of a time when I let the sun dry the milk off me, when I laughed more easily and less often.

I could make this mistake a million more times just to confirm what I already suspected about myself.

I think, you’re ugly. I think, all this pain is punishment for the pleasure I’ve demanded.

I must have thought
 I was clever, and that will have to be enough.

one more, another one, nothing gained. open eyes, night sky I manage sleep again.

copyright © 2017 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[ryanccoleman]

“My Very Own House on a Hill” | part IV

“In my mind, the house stands alone amid a vast plane of scrubbed Earth. A light in the tower flicks on, the same light flicks off.”

IV.

I’ve been around the house a hundred times. 

A road encircles it. The sky around it is big. Black drips into purple in a half circle. The house is two stories with an attic, taller than it is wide. It’s made up of many shades of gray—slate, iron, a delicate, almost lavender for the roof are some. There is a porch and a chimney that tapers to a flat, narrowed tip at the back of the house.  Smoke exits the chimney in bunching puffs. In several places there is ornamental fencing. The tight, black, iron fencing lines the porch, several windows, and if there is a balcony or other kind of exterior landing on the second floor, it lines that. Windows are harder to imagine. They shift around the house like hands on a watch—different, at different times, but to a finite degree. The land all around is red clay. 

I have imagined a street lamp, sometimes. It’s high and arched, made from the same dark metal  as the fencing. A single yellow-orange bulb rests in its chamber like an egg in a cup.

Of course there is a mailbox. There is plumbing, things like that. But in my mind the house is not so encumbered. Anything to suggest ties to an outside world where time ticks in seconds, where bills arrive, where you need procedures — blood flows through the body — this I excise from my mind. In my mind, the house stands alone amid a vast plane of scrubbed Earth. A light in the tower flicks on, the same light flicks off. 

In this space there is no entry. Instead, I circle. I’m like an animal, driven by the simple motivation of hunger. I’ve circled the house for hours. I remember in Sunday school reading the book of Isaiah. The Judgment Against the Nations: “let the Earth hear,“ said the Lord. The Earth turning its head up to the sky. The nation of Edom, obliterated. I thought the priest said “Eden.” I can still recreate it today in his voice. The stinking dead bodies, the blazing pitch, kidney fat sizzling on the sword of the Lord. None of this on the grounds. Instead, what’s left: the desert owl, hyenas cavorting, wild goats bleating, smoke rising forever. This is the way I circle the house: “from generation to generation;” “it will not be quenched.” 

A curious development. A light on in the east-facing bedroom. The animals scurry away. I watch from my place behind a bush down the hill. The sound of gravel crunching under rubber. Movement behind the curtain.

Inside there’s a woman. She stands at the edge of a circular woven rug. The rug is blue, purple, and gray. The floor is wooden. Her toes rest on the rug, her heels on the floor. She feels an electricity move throughout the house. She grips the post of the bed in this room with her left hand but keeps balance with the right. It is strangely contorted in order to do so, tucked and pulled in specific ways to catch gravity like the sails of a ship catching wind.

Behind her, another woman. The second woman is tucked into bed. I don’t see her face but I know that she’s wearing a wig. The wig is divided into pigtails, tied with cheap red balloon string. Her smile is long and flat. I imagine what her wig feels like; I imagine grazing a strand with my fingers, it is rough, and also sleek. It feels the way my own tongue feels. Along the driveway, the road crunches under my wheels. Headlights swing through the grounds like an axe. Behind the bush, my eyes flick, they watch.  

copyright © 2017 Ryan Christopher Coleman