After Joan Didion
To keep the snake in my sight, to not give it more ground, to not relinquish to this snake standing in the door. For every gesture I make, I’ve been pushed two steps back, and soon I’ll have given it the entire room, me pressed right against the wall.
Note it. The room is small, all of two metres by two, and this snake unwraps itself, its rattler in the doorway and repeatedly it shows me its teeth. It is a compromise I’m considering. I give it my arm to bite and I make a run for it.
I strip off my clothes and create a diversion as I go for the door.
I’d cut at my hand, to fed it as I bled, if it meant I’d make it out of here.
We eyeball each other, face-to-face in this impossibility.
After Arthur Miller
“To return to us and to the fold, we request you denounce a witch.”
“Witch, witch, I saw a witch and she tried to possess me. I was once under her sway and have now been released and can see the light but she—I point at her—that woman is a witch and I denounce her publicly. It is only fair she be arrested and thrown into water to see if she will sink. But [crying hysterically] she is a witch and to be kept away because I’m afraid of what she’ll do to me.”
After Harriet the Spy
And they saw fit to publish her diary publicly, this broadcast to be picked over, every thought, every intimacy, thus stripping her of any privacy, and they forgot the stories about stones, only those without sin to cast one or the act of stoning the devil was symbolic because easier is it to find the devil at large, less easy the devil that resides within.
After Macbeth
Thus they were born into a dream, all to universally lust after the power of the king, and Macbeth made his grab for power, admitting his motivations privately but they, the latter, gave it the dress of moral finery.
For every faithful, there are ten zealots, lusting for power, high horsing in their insecurity.
Fool’s Gold
Not every shout of Eureka indicates the presence of gold.
The virus infected them and got under their skin. It stole their joy, it stole their energy, then finally it ravaged their skin.
With this, they covered their shame by retreating socially.
The chameleon-of-a-problem was a species only discovered recently. Wherever there’s a problem, species chameleoprob is found right in the midst.
So they built their tower and put a cup to the cloud of God to hear the secrets of the Host revealed.
There was nothing that was a discernible word, only laughter and then the sound of tears.
The classic.
Wolf, wolf, there’s a wolf among my sheep, and they rush to his rescue, to find him there smiling. Ah, you’ve fallen for my trick, and three episodes of this, and on the day the wolf ate the sheep, he screamed and no one ran because there’s that history of trickery.
The edict was that the cross should go aground. Rather than a headstone, it instead would be buried underneath.
For each their faith shall be a matter of privacy.
Of course there is always the one who has a cross and proclaims it and thus they’re dubbed the public ‘look-at-me’s.
A strange prison sentence.
Lovers condemned, only permitted to lie together five months of the year.
What do you sink with?
I carry the largest rock so when I leap I drown in an act that is annihilating.
To sing in country and be told the truth is found in pop.
They say the vampire isn’t real because there’s nothing that sucks your blood and ghosts don’t exist though I’m haunted lately ever so much.
To retell the oldest truths because the stories speak and to not toil too hard in modernity.
Deprivation and the pure in extremity, and only then let the famished feast.
Tap tap tap the devil set my shoes to tap and uncontrollably they send me to the moon and I don’t make it back because I find enough water in which to drown.
I saw a devil, I saw a god, I saw a witch,
and the times were such I couldn’t tell you which one was which.
Q: Have you died yet?
A: No, I’m still here.
If I am to dance I ask for the beat to go hard.
Sadness that clings sadness that stings
sadness that there’s no getting out from underneath.
A perfect grace that is grace when it falls apart
not at the top of one’s game but at the failure
a grace not at the moment of transcendence
but at the hollows to see still a worth in light.
Are we asking people to turn their lives into museums to the past, that they keep a tradition alive, a belief, a way of life so we can safely say we have the past still in our midst?
And what of the cost of this senseless preservation?
Rather than vitality they have a relic for their trouble which isn’t much satisfaction in the night.
Absolution.
By an act what has been stained will be made pure again.
At the dispensary there’s a line around the block.
Day and night they visit there with their shakes.
Whole and pure, we are to be made deeply ourselves again.
Some money is not worth making.
To make an error in life is to forego self-righteousness.
It is to step off the self-made horse and to consent to be amongst other human beings on the ground.
People can be called to task for their errors but this is to be done with diplomacy.
Sometimes the achievement of a day is not adding one more aggression to the world.
Two fighter jets in the night time leave their trail.
A threat, a warning, a promise.
Didion, after reading García Márquez, had this to say.
What if there was no magic and it was all social reality?
It is an allergic reaction.
To voices, to pictures, to laughter, to company.
My burrow and to be left there for only in solitude is there a measure of peace.
Each woman crying over the dead, her face is my mother’s.
Each man praying over the dead, I see rows of men who look like my father.
Two contradictory impulses.
Wanting to remember and then wanting to forget.
…
Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. She studied medical science and neuroscience at university. Her fiction has been listed for prizes including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Stella Prize.