* * * BECOMING * * *

Jessica Baron, "after Neo Rauch"

Jessica Baron

These poems were first accepted for publication with Parcel and they appear simultaneously—there and here—with permission from the author and the editors.

Vines growing from the mouth
—after Neo Rauch

Pray to the snails and snakes, to things that slither,
pray to the new neon lights marking here,

here, HERE: pray to the television.
Beyond the hill, tanks fire, although just

expending their red shells in the dirt,
so poisonous with a touch we could die

in the grass near our feet, these mushrooms.
Let’s spin our tops anyway.

Let’s play under the eves of this green house,
under birch and bark, under branch and leaf

on the delicate edge of destruction.
The house says nothing, yet makes effort in

blank balloons the length of itself. It’s tired
of parking lots, of carnival rides, tired

of being behind the game, trailing
all action undertaken. Look inside me,

it begs for our attention, waiting
behind curtains, I will reveal my secrets.

Let’s spin our tops anyway;
with the paper dolls’ tales severed, their clothes

no longer stay on bodies, no longer
can they remain upright, interact

with one another, without blowing down.

_____

Some peaches or an orange
—after Neo Rauch

In the clouds, there’s another ocean, more
blue, more strange. If you’re adept and find

food, you might be able to climb a ladder
to the beat of music, a marching band

or electronic drum-kit rhythm.
You won’t need it, leave the music behind,

there at the top. If you’ve managed to climb
carrying in hand already-cut fruit,

there is an abandoned tree, sky on all
sides. Your task will be to climb said tree,

with footholds uneven, its branches far
apart. At the top, be able, you’ll make it

to jump right in, but vault up and out
as between city buildings separated

by a small alleyway. I tell you,
the reward of the water will be worth

all this. Tides never go out, and one
never tires of treading. You can float there

with your sliced fruit, eat section by section
in haze, sugar perfectly balanced.

_____

Seasonally lit
—after Neo Rauch

When reindeer begin coming out sewer
grates, mythical beasts pull the plow,

time has come to re-examine the sky.
A bit of light peeks, look for cracks made

out of helium, I was made to burn.
Handle me with care when you put me

on the grill. I’ll float to a place you can-
not touch my masked inside, water wide

this red behind the silos, trees bare
above the wheat, full of cardboard and tape.

If we clear the medicine cabinet,
they’ll be no more tools. The beaver we keep

in the lightbox will be abandoned, half
man, dinosaur. So much trouble finding

food tall enough to reach its mouth upright.
Small fires rage in distances, he

runs as fast as he can waddle his large
bottom, this red rock under the dirt

calling for an eventual demise.
Don’t touch the snowman, fucker, this chalet

our land of children and snow, red rage, stop
scaring all these customers back through this

turnstile. Now, go with these squash down at the
farmstand, shape of evergreens. Get going

four different colors, someone decorated
for the holiday season: orange, green,

yellow, then blue from the base moving up.
Just try cutting that open to fit all

into the oven, taking care not to mix
those multicolored seeds, our squash insides.

_____

Jessica Baron currently teaches and studies poetry and writing in Fort Collins, Colorado at Colorado State University. She is also a professional actor and performs in the summers at the Creede Repertory Theatre in Creede, Colorado. She received a BFA in Theatre Studies from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Joel Chace, "Scripts, 12-14"

Joel Chace

Scripts, 12-14

* * *

12.

two giants / stands


far and tiny behind them


sees this watches the huge


man grip his giantess’s head force it down


into the deep sink her arms pinned to


sides giant at her back pushes stiffened


neck head farther into the gray


sink you missed me again


again you missed me words /


tiny far but clear

* * *

13.

road into town to


find buildings streets even


other roads away and back across


back / shuffling around in half-light


the one leaving the one staying / the one


leaving shifting blurring and


having returned blurred shifted


part of the one having left left behind


or having brought from


from back a small something /


the one having stayed must revise must


because both must eat

* * *

14.

inca descent it means / diction


letter by letter again slowly it spell


it a dictionary one letter at a time


meaning / incan essence


slowly look


again / incandescence

* * *

_____

Joel Chace has published poetry and prose poetry in print and electronic magazines such as 6ix, Tomorrow, Lost and Found Times, Coracle, xStream, Three Candles, 2River View, Joey & the Black Boots, Recursive Angel, and Veer. He has published more than a dozen print and electronic collections. New from BlazeVox Books is CLEANING THE MIRROR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, and from Paper Kite Press, MATTER NO MATTER, another full-length collection. For many years, Chace has been Poetry Editor for the experimental electronic magazine, 5_trope.

Matthew Cooperman, from "Spool"

Matthew Cooperman

—from Spool

* * *

ease and grace
and little waves
the chancing tide
around us is
arrivals singing waitingly
a lovely timbre
a pliant heart
complexly these are
coupled hours firebath
and fired hearth
two a crucible
played by tongue
game and naming
what truths rise
we are foreigners
to each other
by anchors sprung
to revel shores
resemble sea bottoms
and mountain tops
say equitas madness
dove in cleft
the beginning face
the tender’s own

* * *

to write a
year in threes
these little wiles
and causes what
they bring to
doorsteps projects turns
at the window
on my mind
limit is splendor
bright folds now
love or parenting
the time it
loses or looses
indelible hows plotting
the new child
the better man
bird in hand
a line singing
makes a limit
out of days
slowly the dark
an imperfect finity
forever in time
these nights splendor

* * *

it was white
when I looked
up the sky
child of mine
remembering red a
balloon over rooftops
sitting quietly classrooms
chalk sawdust disinfectant
a clear aquarium
into the future
by looking up
it was possible
a wearied man
to inhabit moods
ask three questions
who are others
what are theirs
lives the needs
to live surreptitiously
better packages minds
to mend and
so inhabit opposites
our alter ever
simply to hymn
be other you
in that classroom
kindnesses my strangers

* * *

have you seen
your hands in
dreams dark darkness
and light a
functional rest to
climbing thoughts why
let down people
and privilege glooms
these hands strangle
thoughts of freedom
by being mine
they remain still
we need dreams
and records of
people I knew
art not as
nostalgia but action
it seems in
a dream quite
real the starry
atmosphere love me
bathe me oiled
the detachment of
hands from bodies
so hard to
make real objects

* * *

_____

Matthew Cooperman is the author of DaZE (Salt Publishing, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), as well as three chapbooks, Still: (to be) Perpetual, Words About James and Surge. A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, and co-poetry editor of Colorado Review, he teaches at Colorado State University.

Nathan Hauke, "Owosso" & "And What Else"

Nathan Hauke

Owosso

Just a few thin sticks in wet snow beneath slants of pines—

Barbed wire fencing marks the back edge of. And, suddenly,

this opens. Grampa O. pulls the middle strand of wire up against the top strand to make an opening for—Uncle Greg and Aunt Cheryl step through with their rifles, but who turns around to hold the fence-wires for Grandpa when

Wet snow thins to transparency, rust as rust-colored needles—


‡


Who turns to hold the fence-wires when

Step through into the field. Gnarled, frozen bark cracks shedding in layers. Pulls the middle strand of wire upward; opens and keeps opening slate grey sky—a clear boundary that pulls apart.

Dry brown leaves drag, spinning forward—mark a

spiral that.

Graphite-colored shadows flattening against snow, slick,

ice-crusted muddy ruts through broken corn-stalks.


‡


Spinning as

Stop-start motion of dry brown leaves rattle—kinetic

against each other in wind, in snow, against the fence. Wire snaps
back into place

They step through into the field, disappear in snow. The distance

reversing unevenly then

As we turn from where we are standing, walk back towards the house.
Our mess of footprints. The distance expanding in, arcs in both

directions

Turn to answer distance / with distance. Frost-stained grass, yellow

surfacing beneath trees in patches—

_____

And What Else

Light rain pattern changing in murky
brown water in. Flowing

in. Stretches of white light against
the inverted reflections of

trees. Muddied hymn in which the
blunt shape of something white

or off-white flows wide against a
reversed fringe of leaves, bank’s

dry brown tangle.

………………………………………………..

Metallic butterfly’s drift beneath double shepherd’s hook. Distance between here and there: m – o – n – a – r – c – h

c – o – n – d – o – m – i – n – i – u – m

that feels true enough

by degrees.

Bent inversions of leaves in

grill’s rounded dome.

White light in shine

And What Else

And so. Looks inside, outside. Weathered door of neighbor’s yellow shed, god-awful lawn jockey. Wind-current gathering in branches, my would-be green clothesline tensed to nuances of weather. White phlox scattered through the lot behind Doris’ house. Language flowering to

answer itself while I sit inside behind changing slats of

blinds drifting in open screen. Another sloppy late-afternoon

rhythm arriving in hampered light—a
black bracelet floating over a white page, a cursive hand alongside a typed hand; a wet
ring on the tablecloth under the bottle.
Gramma or Grampa O. stepping out onto the patio—watery

horizon tunneling between lake and—; how-old thought: whitecaps are
torn envelopes, or no not like. And maybe I

get to wade out to help check the anchor, snap the

top down.


‡


Phil turns on the ballgame, unfolds the newspaper; shakes it open.
Wind’s trace of leaves flipping pale green against dense green of Maple’s foliage. (Do I capitalize
Maple because it’s the only maple. B/c it who-knows, provides a
central location—)

Dry glitter of leaves outside answering wind’s texture. Static. Phil flipping channels during must-be commercials then. Green clothesline wires
tightened to screws, vibrating,

storm-ready—

And What Else

Bark scarred from antlers or whatever.
Marks a renewed desire for there, one gets to / goes to.

I stop and the wet-grey skyline keeps going.

…………………………………………….

Dashed mirror of rain across deck planks—back, and left the
upward arc of pine boughs.

Then why do I think of the lasting fact, face, etc.

The governance of memory opening
wet notes of flowers.

This compulsion to locate a
particular point in

time and space.


‡


A tear of light inside reflection and. World I reach toward, can touch,
taste,

smells sweet/

in the thick summer air. Breathing the humidity, pollen intake
maple, cottonwood seed, and what else—trajectories that
continue inside / body’s lasting

framework


‡


Paint flaking off from an old wooden chair in the dew-dry
garden near the garage. Reading: attention

means transformation—a

chrysalis near the lower cross-beams. Start anywhere and
love widens the context

the way a red maple is red.

………………………………………………

Franklin. Quiet. Megan sleeping inside—her

morning nap. Where’s Maggie

And What Else

Home again, hours later, and okay. Changing light in which that

corner of seawall. Brown water; flat current beneath

and across. A lasting confidence

gift

gift

gift

gift

gift


‡


Open the word and walk inside, under leaves and.

The current fluxing, & I can barely stand / the way I
treasure a dented metal watering can / near the door.

In this variance of light. Morning where.

Brick steps into someone else’s back yard. We choose to / take them or

don’t take them.

And What Else

Margaret sitting outside on the deck, eating an apple in the rain,
watching the dogs play.

_____

Nathan Hauke lives in Salt Lake City. His poetry has been published in (or is forthcoming from) Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, New American Writing, Interim, XANTIPPE, Parthenon West, Colorado Review, Twenty Six, Forklift, Ohio, Electronic Poetry Review, Free Verse, Word For Word, Gutcult, and the tiny.

Mark Irwin, "Landscape With Ball"

Mark Irwin

Landscape With Ball, Then Smeared With Shadow

Standing by home plate, he throws the white ball up
then hits it toward me in the field, all the Blue Ridge Mountains

beyond, and I’m running under it, trying
to judge the arc of its

fall and how, as he taught me, the wind
like time will carry an

event. (We played

on Sundays after church and, walking all the way
to that field, I’d pound my fist

into the cowhide palm and smell its sweat, like that of his Hat

beyond.) White dot against blue getting
larger, and I’m planting one foot and see

on that tree line (rain now on each black coat carrying
a rose) opened ground. “Keep your eye

on the ball.” —Wind, white smack of the closet door
I open to a shirt (forty years) whose body’s gone.

_____

Mark Irwin’s sixth collection of poetry, TALL IF, will appear from New Issues in the fall of 2008. He teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado. Recent work appears in Antioch Review, APR, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, and Tri-Quarterly.

Ginger Knowlton, "Englishman in the Outback"

Ginger Knowlton

Englishman in the Outback

Ink in night, the scent of sulfur. Fumaroles and the earth’s breathing steam. Our eyes straining to see the lake’s waters, when there is nothing to see, no line between horizon and water. He has lost shoes, a child, the sense of longing. A trail of red flowers runs behind us. No one understands how, and the petals float on mud, rising. In loneliness, the human heart expands. Widening, breaching until there is a space hollow enough for a tall bird to enter, to peck at things, rearrange, snip away waste. The bird can sense the palpable ache, the worn-out trekking boots, the way he will sleep for twelve hours in a row of endless days. While he is asleep, the bird will do flips in his heart, will bake comforting foods for him, tweak his proper British accent. Strange words will come out of his mouth in the morning. “Kitty-corner,” he will say, like an American. “Going woop-woop” he will say, pulling on his worn boots, heading out into the Aboriginal bush, past the snakes, the wallabies, the steam of shaking women who have forgotten how to breathe. They lean precariously over quivering holes in the earth. He will carry the bones of his body for days, waking. Even mud can boil and create noise. The bird in his heart will sleep in this time, and he will be lost in the Outback, where the latch of his cage breaks at last.

_____

Ginger Knowlton's writing has appeared in publications such as Bravado, Double Room, 5_trope, the Bark, Marginalia, Many Mountains Moving, Segue, Swerve, Sentence and Tarpaulin Sky. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2007) and more recently served as writer-in-residence at Massey University, NZ.

Megan D. McCabe, "Authoring Adoptee Identity"

Megan D. McCabe
http://heritagecamp.megandmccabe.com/

Authoring Adoptee Identity

The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction "and.and.and." This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.”
—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Today, we tend to conceive of identity as a work-in-progress, something that is changeable and fluid rather than stable or pre-determined. While we have moved away from understanding identity as essential and fixed, postmodern critiques of identity politics offer little guidance for understanding how identity as process, identity as work-in-progress, might be lived out in people’s everyday lives. How do people create identities that are fluid and dynamic, especially as much of the social and political environment still favors that which is stable, coherent, and classifiable?

In this essay, I suggest that even within a “post-identity politics” intellectual milieu, theoretical work that takes seriously the ways people live and experience identity/identities is not only relevant but also vital to cultural studies. That said, I suggest not that cultural studies recuperate past essentialist or unitary models of identity; rather, I argue that postmodern views of identity as fluid and dynamic are not only fitting, but also necessary, for contemporary subjects who negotiate multiple, often contradictory definitions of experience, heritage, and knowledge. Here, I focus specifically on Korean-American adoptee identity. Like other so-called “hyphenated” identities, Korean-American adoptees might be regarded as emblematic of current, accepted notions of identity as multiple and heterogeneous. At the same time, Korean-American adoptees also illustrate the pragmatic difficulty of articulating and living identity as multiple, fluid, and process-oriented, especially in the shadow of what has proved to be an intransigent model of identity as unitary, fixed, and rooted in essences. While international adoption is an increasingly common method of family formation in the United States, adoptees continue to be constructed as liminal subjects, described as caught between two different cultures, histories, or nationalities. Thus, even as recent theoretical understandings of identity have tended to move away from an emphasis on essential origins and toward constructions of identity as dynamic and process-oriented, adoptee identity is still overwhelmingly associated with the reclamation of roots, heritage, and lost origins.

The question, then, it seems is one that asks, “How?” – How do Korean-American adoptees articulate the multiplicity, fluidity, and inconsistencies of identity in a way that nevertheless recognizes the continued political and social currency of identities that are coherent, articulated, and intelligible? In other words, how do Korean-American adoptees carve out and inhabit a space in “the aporia between identity and difference”?[1] In this essay, I suggest that technologies of representation and communication offer not only an answer as to how subjects can articulate complex identities, but also that these technologies offer valuable means by which to understand more fully how identity is and can be theorized.

I propose hypertext, a virtual and nonlinear medium, as a tool for illustrating identity as fluid and process-oriented and, in authoring my own hypertextual autobiography, explore its possibilities for representing Korean-American adoptee identity specifically. While notions of identity as multiple, changeable, and fluid are commonly invoked in culture today, they are too rarely embodied or tangibly represented. This essay attempts to address this omission, suggesting that, through hypertext, a theory of identity as dynamic and in-progress may be put into practice and, in so doing, be greater understood.

Hypertext: Representing Adoptee Identity

Technologically, hypertext is not new; its particular qualities, however, make it a simple and well-suited tool for exploring Korean-American adoptee identity and the process of identity formation, or identity authorship, itself. Theorist N. Katherine Hayles writes that electronic media such as hypertext translate “materially resistant text” into “text-as-flickering-image,” a transformation that challenges certain binary constructions such as stability and instability, presence and absence.[2] Adoptee identity, which is often associated with absence, with a lack of origins or roots, is simultaneously also described in terms of presence, of the adoptee’s presence as the highly visible racial/ethnic other. Hypertext, which problematizes binaries such as presence and absence or difference and belonging, is thus well-suited to the contradictions and paradoxes involved in adoptee identity construction.

As a Korean adoptee, I acknowledge the power that particular constructions of origins, which locate identity in biology and authenticity in origins, still hold over many of our cultural definitions of self. I propose a view of adoptee identity that recognizes the pull of biology, but that simultaneously resists the notion of an exclusive or essential origin as the locus of “true” identity. Central to this view is the role of creativity and the creative process in identity formation. Hypertext becomes a metaphor for identity, its authorship echoing the creative process involved in exploring memory, experience, and self-representation. The authoring of hypertext involves the nomadic movement through varied texts; its piece-by-piece creation resonates with an understanding of identity-construction as a piecemeal enterprise, a putting-together of many, heterogeneous elements from disparate sources.[3]

Hypertext’s ability to link pages of text and image allows for juxtaposition and the different, even contradictory, representation of meanings within the same (hyper)textual space. For example, in my hypertext, I quote, on one page, a brochure produced by a summer camp, “Camp Sejong,” that caters to Korean-American adopted children and their families:

Internationally-adopted Korean-American children straddle two different worlds: American in culture and lifestyle, but Korean by birth. Most of these children have never been back to Korea and many have had little or no contact with other Korean-Americans. Camp Sejong provides an opportunity for these children to make a critical link to their Korean heritage.[4]

The quote expresses a dominant construction of adoptees as caught between “two different worlds,” divided and rootless. The page links, via the word “link,” to another page, titled “Stitch,” which features a poem about the act of hyphenation (as in the term “Korean-American”). The poem seeks to re-define the hyphen, interpreting it not as a division or as indicative of a tear in the seamless fabric of identity, but as an act of suture. The poem re-imagines the hyphen as “a stitch, a bit of thread,” which works ambiguously:

is like a stitch, a bit of thread,
holding together
two continents.

Maybe it extends forever,
a line segment, invisibly shooting
straight out from both ends to infinity.

If you cut it straight through
perhaps you'd get two stitches: twins,
clones, an even number at least
or the start of a pattern of stitches,
a seam.
you could suture
a long and jagged tear.
you could mend something,
you could close a gap, something ugly,
something lovely.

The page relates to 1) the act of adoption, as a “stitching together” of family, 2) to adoptee identity as a heterogeneous suturing of cultures, geographies, and temporalities, and 3) to the creation of hypertext, itself, which involves the non-linear linking together of text and image through electronic space.

The choice to link text from a camp brochure to a poem about adoption and the feeling of being rent, sewn, opened, and closed highlights the surprising, associative meanings that reside in apparently disparate texts. The act of linking performs a productive, purposeful mis-reading which I see as one way adoptees can re-author identity in unexpected ways. The poem “Stitch,” for example, inhabits the textual space of the camp brochure, literally using it as a doorway to its own unfolding, to a new opening up of space that extends creatively and spontaneously.

Importantly, the mis-reading from which the poem emerges (mis-reading the word “link” in the brochure as “stitch,” and then re-imagining it within the poem) is a productive but not destructive act. The poem does not erase, obscure, or degrade the camp brochure text, even as it interprets that text in non-expected, even deviant, ways. The mis-reading approximates theorist Gilles Deleuze’s notion of difference as creative and positive rather than negative, annihilating. Difference assumes the form of poetry, of creativity in a newly opened space. It upends “official” adoption discourse (the camp brochure), but in a way that is not violent, that does not seek to annihilate its interlocutor which, after all, is its own dwelling-place. Such an interpretation of difference acknowledges the adoptee’s need to live not only with, but through contradiction, and indicates an ecology of liminal spaces and subjects of which adoptees take part.

The page titled “Stitch” also links, via the word “twins,” to a page called “Sister.” “Sister” narrates my memory of meeting my biological sister for the first time, both of us adults:

When I first saw my sister, whom I had never seen before but whom I instantly recognized, I found that suddenly I could not sense my own body. It was as though there was a rule: either she or I could exist – not both, but either the one or the other. And so, there I was – bodiless, a bundle of nerves released of their flesh…

Here, the hypertext skips through space and time, performing, in a sense, the multi-temporal, multi-spatial process of stitching together adoptee identity. Such a view of identity rejects definitions that fixate on a singular and essential origin, instead contending that identity is dispersed over many temporalities and many geographies, all in a continual process of reference and counter-reference.

The content of “Sister” is about recognition and embodiment and also, about a paradoxical moment when I saw, in my Korean sister, the image of myself reflected back to me. On one hand, I identified my sister as other, as not-me; on the other hand, however, it was the first time I had encountered someone to whom I bore familial resemblance. The effect was paradoxical, for unlike the image of myself in the mirror, which serves to affirm via its status as “image” my reality, my sister was not an image. She was real – and her flesh-and-blood reality seemed to confuse my own sense of embodiment. The ironic statement: “And so, there I was – bodiless…” registers as an indication of the paradoxical, contradictory nature of that experience.

Deleuze and Guattari have a concept of a “Body without Organs” (BwO) which is virtual and “deterritorialised” – that is, stripped of signification and subjectivity, a purely potential body that is continually “becoming,” and which is thus theorized as an infinite event (“you are forever attaining it, it is a limit”).[5] Hypertexts represent bodies without organs; like the BwO, the hypertext is deterritorialised. It moves its reader nomadically, through a virtual, electronic space that is extendable, mutable, and that is continuously in the state of becoming. Representing adoptee identity through hypertext becomes an exercise, then, in theorizing identity as a BwO. It is an ironic gesture toward a dis-embodiment and de-materialization of the self that is, according to Deleuzean theory, redemptive rather than reductive or annihilating. As the hypertext instantiates, dis-embodiment and de-materialization do not necessitate an erasure of identity; on the contrary, the move toward a deterritorialised notion of self is creative, spontaneous, and productive.

Donna Haraway’s cyborg is similarly deterritorialised and, in the language of Haraway’s Manifesto, is “illegitimate,” the unintended offspring of contemporary political and social systems. The cyborg becomes an appealing model for a new construction of adoptee identity that similarly appropriates and inverts the language of illegitimacy. Korean adoptee and author Rebecca Hurdis has poignantly reflected on the tenacious hold that the discourse of illegitimacy continues to have over adoptee subjectivity:

I have inherited not only the black hair, round face, small hands, and full lips of my birth mother, but I also have inherited the lineage of illegitimacy. My birth mother's illegitimacy flows through my consciousness just as her blood does. First and foremost, my existence lies in the exploitation of my birth mother. I am a product of the transnational relationship between Korea and the United States because I am their creation and their capitalist commodity. But despite my initial location in Korea and my relocation to the United States, I am destined to remain an illegitimate subject.[6]

Hurdis’s statement is testament to the pervasive power that ideologies of biology and nature hold over the experience and construction of adoptee identity. Through the appropriation and revision of discourses of illegitimacy and origins, however, adoptees can create new, habitable identities.

In my hypertext, I include an image of my “Social and Health History” document, which was issued at the time of my adoption. The document indicates, with an “x,” that I was “Illegitimate” and “Abandoned.” The document testifies to the immense definitional weight the label of illegitimacy carries with it; yet, it also illustrates the absurdity of categorization and the constructedness of kinship systems in general. The document, in its terseness, in the strangely totalizing and violent way the “x” figures on the page, represents the powerful and yet strangely arbitrary way such classifications define our constructions of identity. My choice to include the document is in recognition of the power of labels such as “illegitimate” and “abandoned”; yet, it is also to gesture toward an appropriation of those terms, an understanding of adoptee identity as the process of living, not “with” or “despite” illegitimacy, but through it – through the appropriation and reinterpretation of illegitimacy as a creative, deterritorialised, and fluid space for identity formation.

In the hypertext, my BwO, I gather the texts and images that have come to define me and, with that act of gathering, that act of adopting, I see-saw back against my own construction, authoring myself anew. The adoptee identity, then, becomes an adopt-ed identity – non-essential, mutable, fluid, and creative. The hypertext allows me to continuously add to it; the process of weaving identity is on-going, and the ability to differentially enter and re-enter the text supports a notion of identity that can be both familiar and secure, as well as mobile and spontaneous. With these intentions, dreams, and imaginings in mind, I invite you, the reader, to enter the space of my hypertext and to explore it as a virtual representation of adoptee/adopted identity – identity that is multiple, heterogeneous and continually in process.

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Foucault, Michel. D. F. Bouchard, ed. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.

“Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16:1 (1986): 22-27.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” October 86 (Fall, 1993): 69-91.

Hurdis, Rebecca. “Lifting the Shroud of Silence: A Korean Adoptee's Search for Truth, Legitimacy, and Justice,” in Kathleen Ja Sook Bergquist, et al., eds. International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice. New York: The Haworth Press, 2007.

McComiskey, Bruce. “Composing Postmodern Subjectivities in the Aporia between Identity and Difference.” Rhetoric Review 15:2 (Spring 1997): 350-364.

Online Sources:

Camp Sejong, http://www.campsejong.org/.

Notes:

[1] Bruce McComiskey, “Composing Postmodern Subjectivities in the Aporia between Identity and Difference,” Rhetoric Review 15.2 (Spring 1997): 350-364.

[2] N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” October 86 (Fall, 1993): 69-91.

[3] As Donna Haraway writes, we are “not born in a garden,” possessing a “unitary identity.”

[4] Camp Sejong (Camp Brochure). Accessed at www.koreanfocus.org/kffiles/sejongbrochure05.pdf on November 3, 2007.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 149-150.

[6] Rebecca Hurdis, “Lifting the Shroud of Silence: A Korean Adoptee's Search for Truth, Legitimacy, and Justice,” in Kathleen Ja Sook Bergquist, et al., eds. International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice. New York: The Haworth Press, 2007. 178-179.

_____

Megan D. McCabe received a Bachelor's degree from Cornell University and a Master's degree from Georgetown University. She continues to explore cultural constructions of identity, origins, and representation in her academic and creative work. Megan lives in Washington, D.C. with her very small hamster, Pastina.

Erika Szostak, "Accidental Gold-Digger"

Erika Szostak

Accidental Gold-Digger

June 1, 2006

Today, the following ad appeared in the “talent gigs” section of Los Angeles’ Craigslist:

GIRLS NEEDED FOR BODYPAINTING

We are looking for HOT girls and really hot girls with personality for an industry party on June 3. Your job is to be body-painted and dance! It's simple and a lot of fun. You can be topless or nude. Nude pays more. Send pictures and phone number. IF YOU ARE A FLAKE... DON'T WASTE OUR TIME! Thanks and have a great day.

June 3, 2006

Santa Ana: Where “industry party” turns out to mean bachelor party for son-of-obscure-mob-affiliated-reality-TV-star and where rented female bodies stand in for window dressing: decorative as tassels, softening edges, showcasing the view. Where fire swirls on the end of two chains swung by naked dancers balanced on the edge of a terrace and where topless hypnotists and bare blackjack dealers attend to those men not cheering the strippers with their poles, plastic fists and double-headed dildos. Where women serve as kitchenware: sushi offered on fleshy platters, the teeth of men scraping rice off slender thighs. Daniel, the fourth Baldwin brother, dashes about, coke-addled, red-faced, sweating through his misbuttoned shirt. The urban legend is real. The other men have names like Vinnie, Carmine, Bronco, Charlie, Angelo and Snake (who secures the perimeter). They are New York Italians with Rolexes and Lamborghinis, customized choppers, wives interchangeable as silk handkerchiefs.

My job: arrive, disrobe, stand in front of airbrush gun, smile, socialize. My job: become a walking combodity with a painted-on personality, airbrushed lace. My job: slink in nude stockings and dance in man-made lace, glitter twinkling on skin.

At the edge of the swimming pool I am accosted by a large man with a bucktoothed smile and a mouth full of crown teeth. He is cradling two yipping Pomeranians, a gold and diamond-studded Rolex on his wrist. He whoops, “Girl, you are on fire! You can burn me anytime!” He proffers the fluffy dogs so he can snap a photo of me holding them against my flame-stenciled breasts and immediately wants to know what I do. “You’re not a stripper,” he says. “I can tell.”

When I tell him that I am in fact in graduate school, he huffs and begins to strut, indignant that I should be so smart and so naked. He is loud and excitable, a man of exclamation marks. Girls with brains shouldn’t have to strip for money! Broads like me are better than that! Don’t I know this party is full of assholes, real bad men! What am I doing here hanging out with such scum! Graduate school is expensive, I tell him, and I can fairly see the cape of Captain Save-a-Ho unfurl from his shoulders, can almost hear his shining armor begin to clank.

“Come with me,” he says, and grabs my hand, pulls me into the house and up the stairs. Toward the bedrooms. The dogs whine and dart around our feet. Bronco opens a door to one of the rooms; it is white walls and polyester zebra-striped bedding, a clock radio on a rickety nightstand - cheap décor in a house of ostentatious wealth.

His colossal arm encircling my waist, Bronco sweeps me into the bedroom, shuts the door, slaps my behind. He unzips his windbreaker, shrugs it off of his shoulders. “Put this on, girlie,” he says, and hands the jacket to me.

I tell him I can’t; it’s my job to be body-painted and dance. He wants to know how much I’m being paid for the evening’s entertainment, and when I tell him $250, he curses those “cheap kike bastards” because I “deserve at least a grand” and promises to collect my money himself. He paces and rails; they’ll be sure to pay me if he has anything to say about it. He’s a pro, used to collecting money from people who don’t want to give it up. I get drunk on vodka tonics and adulation -- a reckless sense of protection -- hardly notice I won’t be able to make the 50-mile drive home to L.A.

June 4, 2006

The morning after the party, I wake up alone in the zebra-decorated bedroom, sun streaming through the windows. Carmine is standing over me and smiling, his enormous opal ring flashing. “Where’s Bronco?” he wants to know. Smirking.

“I don’t know. Nothing happened,” I snap. “We didn’t do anything.”

“How old are you,” he says. “Do I look like your fuckin’ father? Ya think I care what ya did in the bed?” Carmine makes me feel like a child, rightfully chastised and silly—who am I, this naked painted girl, waking up in a mobster’s house in Orange County seeking approval and validation of myself from this older man I barely know?

But Carmine and Bronco do make me think of my father; they are men of the same generation, but my father is nothing like these men. My father, despite working seven days a week, year after year, is in monstrous debt, and his drinking lately has become routine. He works, and clients regularly refuse to pay him, and he lacks the energy, or the perhaps it is the authority, to demand that they do. When they pay only a fraction of what he’s billed, he discounts the bill until it matches the pittance they’ve paid. I think he would envy these men with their flashing jewelry, their easy gambling, their power to make raw commands. Before my grandmother’s small inheritance was all spent, my father bought two things that he rarely has occasion to wear: a fine tuxedo and a shining gold Rolex. He rarely wears the Rolex, but when he does, it seems to me it is only men like Carmine, Bronco and Charlie whom he might impress. My father would not agree with the mobsters’ morals, their violent paths to wealth, but by donning the same accoutrements, he sometimes looks as if he might.

I walk out of the bedroom, bleary and still nude under Bronco’s billowing windbreaker, airbrushed lace smeared across my legs. “Good morning, beautiful,” shouts Bronco, as he strides into the living room. “Whoo, is it time for some Moons-over-my-hammy! Let’s go to Denny’s.”

When I demur, he barks that he thought I was too smart to be such a dumb broad. I should think of it as the best job I’m ever gonna have: $500 for breakfast and he just wants to hear me talk. “I don’t want you for your tits, sweetie; I want you for your brains.”

June 15, 2006

Bronco, whom I’ve come to think of as the man with the Pomeranians and the exclamation marks, has called me daily since the bachelor party. They call him Bronco, he says, because he’s crazy like Bronco Billy, because he’s real, he likes to drive hard and he doesn’t take no shit. Bronco speaks a language unfamiliar to me, his sentences peppered with abbreviations, acronyms, masculine slang. He speaks of Rollers (Rolexes), Lambos (Lamborghinis), a C.C.W. (license to carry a concealed weapon), the O.C.D. (Organized Crime Division), forensic attorneys, chasing hard paper (debt collection). He is all flattery and money, braggadocio and eagerness to please. Full of fantasies that he knows me, Bronco says that I’m his girl, that one day I’ll be his wife, that we’ll have something to talk about when the topic of conversation isn’t him talking about how well he knows me, how perfect I am, my flat abs, my wonderful breasts and brains. Full of fantasies, neither one of us admits that our shopping trips are about his hopes that every dollar thrown my way will open up my heart and my legs.

This is power that I don’t know what to do with: a gruff, gun-slinging middle-aged man who recoils at the tiniest threat of my displeasure. I understand who he wants me to be, and who he wants me to let him be: my knight in a shining Lamborghini. It should be easy, it seems, to play this game, and the material rewards— “Sweetie, you don’t need to worry about a job”— glitter in his arms like a pot of gold at the end of this too-many-hours-a-week-at-a-school-I-wish-I-didn’t-need rainbow.

I think I want these things that Bronco is offering, though it feels, as if in accepting them, I might lose any grasp on what I know as my self, lose my independence, lose the freedom to account to no one for what I do with my time. As if letting someone else rescue me from my life means I’ll never learn how to rescue myself. Bronco wants my full attention, and fielding his advances is beginning to take every second I have. He is a man of uncompressed energy, a man who paces, sweats, wheezes, exclaims, gestures, shouts, calls constantly and jumps out of chairs. I am terrified of Bronco’s desire, a gaping abyss into which I am trying not to fall.

The first time Bronco cooks dinner for me, he locks Mufasa and Shere Kahn in his bedroom. Behind the door, they yap and scratch, their nails clicking rhythmically against the wood. He wraps shrimp, garlic and butter in foil and throws it on the grill, which he’s forgotten to preheat, impatiently checks the foil every 30 seconds. Bronco reddens, sweats; his temperature rises faster than the gas grill’s. He removes the shrimp from the grill too soon, serves them undercooked. He’s never made shrimp before; all this slow-cooking takes too goddamn long. He wants it to be perfect and he wants it now, tries to fix dinner by microwaving the shrimp, which become inedible, congealing to rubber. Except Bronco doesn’t know that the shrimp are rubbery because he doesn’t eat them, only watches me eat. From across the round kitchen table, he gazes at me - elbows on the table, leaning forward, fleshy hands folded as if in prayer of supplication. He knows I like shrimp though, personally, he hates seafood, would rather have prime rib and potatoes. Except I don’t eat red meat so this massive man has decided to go without. No plate rests on the table in front of him. This makes me angry, though if I am honest, it is the kind of anger that thinly disguises fear, and I snap at him. “Don’t ever do that again,” I tell him. “Make pasta next time or something else. No woman wants to eat alone.”

I keep telling myself that I will let Bronco think what he wants of me and I will play his arm-charm game. Instead, an uncontrollable rebellious streak keeps surfacing. When Bronco orders from his favorite Chinese restaurant, I tell him his use of the term “gook food” is disgusting and call him a racist pig. When he buys me leather pumps, I tell him I’m a tomboy and hate stilettos, that he should throw the shoes in the trash, that if he really cared about me, he wouldn’t want my feet to hurt. When he asks if I like his Roller and its matching rope chain, I tell him that yellow gold jewelry on a man is the province of slimeballs. When he makes me osso buco in a second attempt at dinner, I refuse to eat, declaring that eating veal is inhumane, and furthermore, the red roses he’s given me are trite. He should never give a woman cut flowers, I tell him, because they symbolize the way attempting to possess beauty leads to a withering away and death. When I’m alone, I go on uncontrollable eating binges, reshaping my body, subconsciously attempting to redefine myself as more than my body, destroying the flat abs that flatten me into a paper doll.

June 17, 2006

My girlfriend says my petulance must be due to low self-esteem, that daddy must have never bought me a thing. Women with high self-esteem, she says, not only think they deserve such gifts, they demand them. I could get rich quick, but I’m hopeless, she says, hopelessly middle-class, hopelessly grounded in my Indiana upbringing, my family of pig farmers, peasant German stock.

My other girlfriends advise, “Meet him in public places. Have him pick you up from ‘friends’ houses.’ Don’t let him know where you live.”

Bronco asks specific questions; I give evasive answers. He wants to know, “What freeway do you take to get home? Which exit? And then which way do you go? Do you live close to here? How far?”

I deliberately choose meeting places outside of my neighborhood. “My house isn’t far,” I lie. “10 minutes, northeast.” I tell him I’m a control freak and insist on always having my own car.

“Honey,” says my sister, “please don’t piss off the hit man.”

“Is anyone messing with my girl?” Bronco wants to know. “I’ll squash ‘em like a cockroach!”

June 21, 2006

Bronco wants to know why I won’t say I’m his lady, why I don’t move in.

I touch his hands, pass my fingers over the grizzled hairs sprouting from his knuckles, tell him I’m not used to thinking of men his age in any but a fatherly way.

“Fatherly!” Bronco sputters and tears his hand away. The white hairs combed carefully across his scalp springing out of place as he lies, “I’m only 39! Girl, I ain’t nobody’s dad.”

June 24, 2006

I’ve begun to calculate my worth in dollars and cents. How many two-hour breakfasts at suburban Orange County diners and how much of my time and energy and body and soul does $350 or $500 or $800 buy, exactly? Does a new dress from a trip to the shopping mall equal a whole day’s worth of my life, and if so, which brand of dress is worth a whole day and which kind is worth a quick lunch? If Bronco pays my rent, do I owe him a month? With each gift that I accept, how much less valuable do I become? When I decline to go shopping because it is too exhausting to do so much math, though I don’t tell him this is the reason, Bronco sputters and wheezes and sighs, lacking the words but not the exclamation marks. He is unaccustomed to women who do not know their own worth.

June 29, 2006

I am preparing to leave for a 10-day trip to Mexico where I’ll meet my family, most of whom live in Indiana. I’ve warned Bronco, who calls me at least ten times each day, that during my trip I’ll be unreachable by cell phone. As I take my leave, Bronco is hurt because, still not wanting him to know where I live, I have refused to allow him to drive me to the airport. I’ve also flatly refused to allow him to come along on the trip, despite his desire to meet the strictly Catholic parents who produced such a perfect daughter and for whom, he refuses to believe, they wouldn’t think he was wonderful. He says, “I’ll miss you so much. I feel like I’m losing my best friend.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” I say, “I’m coming back.”

The next day, upon arrival in Mexico, I see that Cozumel is still in the throes of hurricane recovery. The island shimmers with a treacherous beauty: broken balustrades and rumpled lengths of rebar jutting from crumbling, half-painted concrete; forests of sharply stripped branches pointing skyward; scorpions flexing their tails alongside open-toed sandals on sidewalks; all of this sharing space with darting striped iguanas, stinging fire coral, cabbage roses, barracudas and nurse sharks in an impossibly sapphire sea. The island, like Bronco’s bouquet of cut flowers, makes me ineffably sad. I buy a sparkling Mexican opal on a string, but it does not cheer me up. For every opal I take home, the island left behind fades a little. The money I spend here, I realize, is as much an attempt to possess beauty as the money Bronco spends on my rent, leading just as surely to a devaluation, every day a diminishing return.

July 4, 2006

I’ve spent the week reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Mitchell’s text and its indictment of consumerism come at a time of my life when consumerism in the form of a lonely, wealthy middle-aged man beckons me and my newly constructed body through a gilded doorway, price of entrance merely leaving my identity on the floor, flaked off like 29-year-old paint.

Mitchell speaks to me now as I sweat under a thatched umbrella on a deceptively pristine strip of island beach. I watch my father standing at the water line with a cocktail in hand, puffed up and pretentiously impressed with the expensive liquors available at the open bar to those of us wearing the properly colored wristbands.

Next to his wristband, tonight, I’m sure my father will wear his Rolex. It’s not the sort of thing he wears much at home, but on vacation it’s easier for us to indulge pretensions to socioeconomic success. We’re members of a vacation club, Platinum Plus level, and I wish my father, who is a terrible businessman running my family into slow, sure bankruptcy, but who is honest and generous to bank-breaking fault, would stop dropping names, names he can’t even pronounce. That’s one of the benefits of being Platinum Plus, he’s informed me countless times, as much premium liquor as a body can drink, including Dom Perignon (which he calls “Dom Perry-non”), as many Cuban cigars as we can puff without throwing up.

Every year on vacation, my father spends the week gorging himself on the symbols of affluence that he can’t afford at home. He doesn’t understand why I don’t join him in these indulgences, but I never do. During these humid weeks, I want them less than I ever would. He seems genuinely baffled by my behavior. As if the cigars I’ll never smoke or the champagne I think is grotesquely overpriced have any stake in the reasons why I love my father -- my wonderful, flawed, dedicated, hard-working and infuriatingly dependable father, too terrified of change to climb out of his own sinking ship.

I love my father for the swim lessons and camping trips, for Saturday afternoon noon tuna salads and Sunday morning newspapers, for chopping firewood and riding boogie boards and “cooking us in the pot,” for reading me stories at night and walking me to the bus stop, for chocolate Frosties after gymnastics and for toasted bagels with butter and cream cheese in the mornings. I love my father for all of those things, but I do not love him for his Rolex; I would like to throw his Rolex into the rolling sea.

This is what makes me sad for my father; that he seems to live his life trying, through meaningless monetary gestures, to impress people he neither knows nor likes, to impress the people he does both know and like with material things, with posturing and qualities we know better than in which to believe. This is what has precipitated the looming bankruptcy to which he’ll never admit, but the rest of us have seen coming for years.

What will happen if I keep on accepting Bronco’s gifts? I fear I will turn into my father; that I’ll stop talking about the things that matter, equate the cost of liquor with its ability to dull a shaming pain, put on a toxic cloak made of amber bubbles and stinking smoke.

What will happen if I keep on accepting Bronco’s gifts? I fear that that with every rose and stiletto I take, I discount myself; that in the accepting things he’s bought, I turn myself into the thing that can be bought.

I see two Rolex-decorated wrists, heavy with expectations and gold, both badges but neither with honor. My father’s watch, earned honestly, is worn dishonestly. It is the sign of a kind of wealth he does not possess, a uniform of men with whom he would not fit. In that man’s universe, life can be measured out in diamond-encrusted coffee spoons. There exists only one kind of wealth in that universe. It is not the means to wealth that matter there, but only the ends. In my father’s universe, though he kills himself thinking it is the ends that matter, those ends which rise up like a horizon he is never able to reach, like a house payment that can never quite be met, his refusal to resort to dishonesty earns him a badge of honor which does not glitter and which he does not know he wears. In a world where the Rolex is the only badge that matters, my father’s integrity makes him dull as the scuffed nickel back of an old railroad watch. I wish he could see that Bronco’s watch, earned dishonestly, is worn with the honor of thieves, sign of a lifestyle that takes far less courage than my father’s to live.

_____

Erika Szostak holds an M.A. from Loyola Marymount University with emphases in Rhetoric and Creative Writing. Currently, she works as an instructor of English at various Los Angeles area colleges.

Andrew Terhune, "Eileen & I"

Andrew Terhune

Eileen & I

We cling tightly
to the left margin,
Eileen and I.
Leave the gutter
clear of debris
and let white
space cover both
sides of the fence.
This process, or
whatever we’re doing
here, reminds
me of my uncle
Alan and how
he danced voodoo
around his
brokedown
plumbing truck,
trying to resurrect
what’s long gone
and dead – and
how he
loves Bob Dylan.
Sometimes we
enter the page
and get so turned
around that we
walk backwards
and sideways
but ultimately
we just

_____

Andrew Terhune is a proud representative of the displaced South in Chicago, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. His poems can be found in Columbia Poetry Review, Glass, O Sweet Flowery Roses, and online at www.andrewisvanishing.blogspot.com.