The 2 doctors have determined that I’m 24 years old. (By my teeth, among other things. Making me feel like a horse. A mare.) & that I’ve had at least one miscarriage.
Probably more than one: according to the mother figure of the team, Dr. Rachel Krotkin. The father figure is Dr. George Gamble Jr.. A junior who is pushing 50. I can’t understand why anybody wants to stay a son that long. Unless his father is a king.
Tiziano Colibazzi was in my class at The New School this spring. He was doing a dual degree in poetry and non-fiction in the M.F.A. program. Early on, I learned that he was a psychoanalyst. We spoke briefly, once, on a street corner, about his life, but that now seems like a luxury. Covid hit; we were on Zoom. In those squares. I recall Tiziano gesticulating that he was losing his mind, with the kids home all day—home schooling—he had seven-year-old twins he shared with his ex-husband. If they come out of their room," he said, "I may have to go to them." And they did.
Out the window, the massive apartment building that has been of no interest for thirty-four years is being repointed or resurfaced or sandblasted, whatever it's called, one by one every building on this block has been upgraded, spruced up, made new, though they are all unspeakably ugly and always will be, they've been freshened to reflect the invisible presence of money, the money of companies, all of them sinister, some of them under investigation, that have bought up the neighborhood from more artlessly grubbing slumlords now dying of old age, and this has instilled in those of us who hav
Deft, kinky and resolute, Birgül Oğuz’s prose sails into her characters and tenderly splits them open. In “Revol” are displayed the inner worlds of working people, at marginal, insecure jobs in Istanbul, or any Aegean, Mediterranean city, and their wobbly, brilliant heroism. Oğuz’s prose is tactile; consciousness and experience are conveyed in language of the skin.&
_ Your limbs feel almost like they’re floating, your eyelids, heavy…
_ His eyes. ..
_ Go ahead...
_ They’re staring at me…
_ Just his eyes?
_ I don't like them because they're too... open. They're pretending to care about me.
_ And that bothers you?
_ Because...
_ Do you feel you don't deserve it?
_Yes—I mean—no, I deserve it, it's just I don't trust those eyes.
_ Because you don't think he cares about you, really.
In the city with bad traffic, Masha’s being late didn’t surprise me. I mused on the inefficient traffic despite so many broad streets created for triumphal armies returning from Sweden by Peter the Great, the father of the city. I was a bit nervous because on the way I had seen a corpse of a young man, on Griboyedova Embankment, whom hundreds of passers-by ignored.
Now
The alarm goes off for the second time. N reaches around J, hits the alarm, sits on the side of the bed. J hides farther under the blankets. A gray morning.
We have to get up, N says. You have to go to work. I have to pick up the dog.
Fuck work, J says into the pillows, Fuck the dog. Fuck you.
We don’t have time for that, N says.
Piano Lesson (2019)
Soir Bleu (2019)
Big Band (2019)
There are those boys-to-men whose slightened look seems built in, permanent. Are they beautiful through the sheer fact that they've been thwarted? With lithe, curtailed limbs and a taste for shiny, tailored clothes, they resemble jockeys. But when their heart-shaped faces are pinched by too many sleepless nights on the street, their wiry bodies take on a shrunken look. It is then one realizes that their delectable slightness may be the result of early drug use or their mother's own libidinal activities during pregnancy.
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