Because of the heat, she decides to sleep downstairs. “This old townhouse funnels the stuff upwards like acid reflux,” she says. She slips from the sheets, props the standing fan under her arm.
It’s fine by him; he relishes in spreading out on the bed without her. (Starfishing, she calls it.) He listens to her footsteps recede on the stairs and unfurls his limbs to the four corners of the mattress. Above him the ceiling fan carves circles in the air, striving to please.
Two days ago an ambulance came down their street at an un-ambulance-y pace and pulled its left two wheels up onto the sidewalk in front of a house three doors down. The paramedics brought out an old woman and tucked her into the back. One by one, as if on bad knees, the wheels clunked gingerly back onto the street and the ambulance pulled away. The lights twirled without spirit. No siren.
She says, “I hope when I go they put their back into it. I want to scream through the streets. Blast through red lights. I want the people to know that death is in their midst.”
“It’s the heat,” he says. “This almost visible heat, creeping through the neighborhoods and stripping life away.”
“This heat,” she says. “This sludgy, quicksand heat, with nowhere to go but into us.”
He can almost taste it: like a membrane on his tongue, hints of moist metal and decay. She can almost hear it: the vibrations in the space between the molecules, the science-fiction throb of radiation.
They hear of toddlers desiccated in the back seats of SUVs; dogs too. They shake their heads at these distant tragedies. “This evil heat,” he says. “You can almost smell it, can’t you? It’s like, it’s like . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.
In the morning she is gone before he awakes, the pull-out couch a swamp of sheet and pillow. Her scent is there, her residue, among the creases and stains. He lifts the edge and folds the evidence of their sleeping arrangement back into itself.
At this moment she is in their car, among other cars, waiting for a light to change. Sweat beads on her temples, her dress shirt already translucent with moisture. She shields her eyes against the rising sun. The radio tells her not to hope.
She gets home at seven.
“Two more ambulances today,” he says.
“They’re dropping like flies,” she says.
They sleep apart again.
“It’s on you,” she says. “It’s coming off you in waves.”
In the silence, he hears the clunk of the couch being pulled out. When he stretches out his joints creak and tingle and sigh.
He surprises her by getting up when she gets up. He is sitting in the kitchen when she emerges from the shower. He says he wants to get a start on the day. She has told him: you need to attack life, you need to be proactive. Lately, she tells him: you need to find a job. She is pleased to see a stack of resumes on the table in front of him.
“I’m only going to apply at places with air conditioning,” he says.
While she waits for a light to change he sits on the couch where she sleeps and watches the ambulances come up the street. They clamber onto the sidewalks and swallow up the bodies the paramedics present like offerings. The bodies are not all elderly—one is a woman no more than forty.
The resumes are still on the table when she gets home. He tells her about the ambulances, about the younger woman. She can see it has rattled him. “The traffic is getting lighter,” she says.
The next morning they awake in their separate beds to a line of ambulances blocking the street and she stays home from work. The electricity is off. A battery-powered radio tells them to expect rolling blackouts. Together they sit on the couch and watch the parade of corpses: elderly, adult, teenaged, infant, wheeled one by one towards the ambulances, placed gently inside. He imagines the bodies dissolving, like a candy on the tongue.
Their sweat is permanent, a second skin they never shed. They eat crackers and tuna for lunch. “Weird,” she says, “without the hum of the house.” The silence spreads out beneath them. Its depth makes them uneasy, like open water, like anything too vast to have an edge.
There is a flurry of activity at the end of the street. One paramedic is fighting another paramedic because, it seems, one paramedic has stolen the corpse out of the back of the other paramedic’s ambulance. They flail at each other and tear their uniforms. The first paramedic throws a punch and knocks the other one out. A third paramedic scoops up the unconscious paramedic and places him in the back of his ambulance.
“This heat,” he says.
The next day there are no ambulances.
She says, “I wonder . . .”
They knock on their neighbor’s door and it swings inward. They take a box of cereal and a bottle of soda from the pantry before they go. In each house, they snatch a sort of treasure: a can of soup, a pair of slippers, a book of piano music. It feels both right and wrong. It feels to him like they are following instincts now that they had long ago suppressed. They are in the eighth house and she is standing in the living room with an umbrella propped under her arm when she announces she doesn’t feel well.
He checks the last few houses on his own. In one he finds an aquarium with two orange fish swimming around. He gets it halfway home before the sweat on his hands causes it to slip and crash to the sidewalk. The fish twitch on the concrete and are still.
In the kitchen, he pours them glasses of warm soda. She sits at the table with her head in her hands. They use the resumes as coasters.
That night he stretches to the corners of the bed. His shoulders grind like unclutched gears, hips scream like ocean liners colliding. He stretches further than he ever has before. His fingers and toes flick in the air over the lip of the mattress and he thinks how easy it would be to simply break apart.
But then she is there above him. He moves over and she climbs in. She runs her fingertips over his chest, paints pictures of glaciers and mountain valleys and coral reefs and low clouds. Above them, the ceiling fan is still.
In the morning her hand is on his chest, except it isn’t. It’s just her heat that is there.
He finds her in the bathtub and she is mostly gone. He puts his hand on her forehead. It’s cooler in the porcelain, she says. He turns the tap and water comes out. Not warm or cold, just water. There is no answer when he calls for an ambulance. He leaves the water on but it does not cool her, nor does it wash her away.
That night he is stretching on the bed when the power comes on. The house spasms, resuscitated, the current rushing in like blood returning to a sleeping limb, tingly and hopeful. Above him, the ceiling fan resumes its half-hearted ambulations. He curls his limbs back into himself and blinks in the midst of such sudden life.
Dad is not here, but he should be, soon, from work. He doesn’t drink and he’s not having an affair. He is a big man, I know. He likes red meat and horseradish. My sister’s boyfriend works, too, at the train depot, but him and my sister are both upstairs already.
Mom puts butter rolls in the oven at 425 degrees. Lying on my back in the family room, I have my feet on the grille of our gas fireplace. I test myself to see how long I can rest my feet on the glass part where it’s hot. I’ve seen mom try it. Ten seconds, fifteen. My feet are like tiny sock puppets. I know it’s time to remove them from the charred surface when they curl up. I grit my teeth at twenty seconds.
My feet shrivel like burning plastic melting over a lighter. Over a match. Over a box of matches. Over a bonfire. The protective screen is plagued with black singe marks from the loose threads that burn off and stick.
I switch from the glass to the grille again and the heat follows. I rub my toes from top to bottom between the gold looking bars. A tone sounds as I strum across them like a xylophone from the blue-hot place at the center of the fake logs. From Hell. The notes are too close together. Too similar in pitch. I test the dissonance, louder each time, blaming it on a goblin who strikes the bars using a tiny foot mallet. He crawls in and out with a finger over his mouth, hushing me. I test mom’s patience. She doesn’t want him in our home.
Next, my heels are treated, hitting the hot pressure points and nerve endings. I lie there with my mouth open like a doll’s, arms out, very limp. My cheeks’ spider-leg veins are reflected in the gold paint, flushed and prickly. Mom had to come get me from school early today. But it’s late now, or just dark. I check the clock on the VCR. It is 5:30 PM, in January, in Minnesota. It is dark. Dad should be home soon for a home cooked meal.
KC the Cat misleads me behind my back, going one way, a pirouette, then the other.
“You tricked me,” I say. “Your loss. I was going to pet you.”
KC the Cat is five years old. I am thirteen, but mom says I have an old soul.
Dad walks in and trips on my boots in the mudroom.
“What did I say this morning? What did I tell you to do?” he asks, out of breath from almost falling to the floor on the wet dirt-rug.
“You were supposed to move these! There needs to be an unobstructed walking path!” He doesn’t drink, he’s not having an affair. He is just angry. I think work makes him angry. Mom says that’s just the way he is.
“We have a shoe bin!” He yells.
Dad holds his knee while coming at me, through the kitchen, down the single step into the living room where I continue to stir, slowly. I picture him clumsily dashing on all fours like an injured farm animal.
He slaps the back of my head. I feel my hair get matted up. He orders me to spit on my palm, I do, and then he presses the damp side against the hot glass of the fireplace where I just had my feet. It hisses. Mom screams. Dad is trying to catch his breath. He grabs at his chest. He falls to the floor. All the noise makes my sister and her boyfriend come downstairs. My sister covers her mouth with her hand.
“Jesus Christ,” her boyfriend says.
The fire alarm goes off. The butter rolls are burning in the oven. My hand is burning. My sister’s ears are burning. Her boyfriend goes to fan the smoke detector with a blanket. He is used to furnaces and steam engines and heat. Dad is seizing on the carpet. I get up and open a door. KC the Cat runs out into the snow. I look at the neighbor’s chimney, and the chimney next to theirs. I look at the exhausting smoke and wonder if it’s from the combustion of wood or gas.
The first time I met poet and writer Shy Watson was after a reading in Brooklyn I’d organized in the summer of 2019. I’d heard of Shy for years, admiring what seemed to me to be a prolific amount of published work; within three years she had published dozens of poems, reviews, interviews, four chapbooks and a poetry collection. She was somehow involved in all the independent presses and magazines I admired: Metatron, Wonder, Bottlecap Press, Ghost City Press, Peach Mag, and Hobart as well as running and editing her own press: Blush Lit. And her work was deserving of attention. It’s present, it’s wanting, it has a quality about it like a compelling detachment, it shows the reader a world enfolding like a tour guide, a world morally ambiguous with sudden bursts of love, romance, nostalgia, and violence. A world fully her own. It’s hard to take your eyes away.
I’ve been lucky enough since then to come in and out of New York, to hear Shy read and share her work, to share dinner and wine together with mutual friends. And isn’t that a big reason we publish poetry? To share work and have fun with other poets? To talk with other poets? So when I heard Shy’s new book Horror Vacui (House of Vlad) was coming out I was eager to read it, to talk to her about her work. Horror Vacui is written in three parts. The first section, the longest, is made up of the Horror Vacui poems. The second, Waking Dreams, is a series of prose poems in which the world shifts and turns without warning. The third, Quarantine Diaries, is a down-to-earth accounting of personal daily events in New York within six weeks near the beginning of quarantine. Through the entire book is a desire for experience, a deep dive into the inner world, and an attempt to catalog a world outside the self that refuses understanding.
Below is the interview we conducted a few days before Christmas, 2020, as Shy got home from taking a COVID test.
****
Brad Casey: Hey! How are you? Where are you right now?
Shy Watson: I'm good! I'm back in Brooklyn but begrudgingly going to Missouri tomorrow (hence COVID test).
BC: How did the COVID test go? And how has Brooklyn been feeling?
SW: The COVID test was fine. I got it done at one of the walk-in clinics here in Brooklyn. People here either go to ModernMD or CityMD, and the two are across the street from one another which creates a kind of rival business effect, like Pat's vs Gino's. The line took three hours, but they brought out hand warmers. They said they'd call within an hour if the test was positive, so it looks like I'm in the clear. Usually, they email results regardless of what they are within 15 minutes but they said the computers are down. Brooklyn has been good, all things considered. I've basically just been spending time with my new boyfriend and working on novel edits! I'm very fortunate to live with roommates who I love during this time.
BC: So I loved reading Horror Vacui. I'm wondering what were the conditions under which you wrote it. When and where did you write it? Was it all in Brooklyn? Was it all written this year?
SW: It was mostly in Brooklyn, yes. But the first twenty poems or so were written between Cheap Yellow's publication (February 2018) and one year ago. The majority of it was written in the past year, though. A few of them were written in Mexico, where I stayed for a month to work on a draft of my novel manuscript last January.
BC: I wonder if you find a difference in tone between the poems written in those spaces? Like what was written in Brooklyn before / after the pandemic started and also the poems from Mexico.
SW: I think so! I mean, I like the newer ones better, but it always goes like that for me. The end is a lot more prose-heavy, with the Waking Dreams & Quarantine Diaries, which was influenced by the fiction workshops I have been taking during the past year.
BC: Why did you decide to structure the book this way? With the Horror Vacui poems to start, followed by the (if you'd describe them this way) prose poems from Waking Dreams and then ending with the Quarantine Diaries? They all shared a tonal similarity I enjoyed, it made sense, but I'm wondering about that decision on your part.
SW: I feel like the poems serve as kind of appetizers for the prose. Like, they're short and fun and kind of ease the reader in. Or maybe I did it simply out of habit because the prose in Cheap Yellow was in the back. I wondered if I should try to lure people in with the best stuff first, but instead, I kept it pretty chronological.
BC: Oh interesting! Because the whole thing is strong but I felt really pulled in by the poems. Like for me, the poems felt like the main feature of the book. I especially felt pulled in by the desire for experience that was being communicated through them. It didn't matter what kind of experience the speaker was going for, there was just a desire for anything, anything exciting to happen good or bad. You know what I mean?
SW: Yeah definitely! Wow, how cruel of me to release it during quarantine... Horror Vacui: The FOMO Book.
BC: Not at all! I think that want for experience is so strong right now, it's great to see it reflected. Like these lines stuck out to me: “thinking about how if i / threw my fist into a Picasso painting / something exciting would happen.” I think we all want to throw our fist through a Picasso painting right now.
SW: Haha, truuuue. Especially after this new COVID relief deal.
BC: Do you find liberation in experience? And do you find yourself gravitating toward experience regardless of whether you think it will end well or badly?
SW: Yes! And, I do. I was actually talking about this with a friend the other day, how I don't mind bad (though not traumatic) experiences, so long as they're interesting. Sometimes bad experiences end up being really funny later, or they teach you something about people or your relative place in society. But good experiences are always nice, too! Honestly, I want it all.
BC: I feel similarly. And I think for me that comes in part from growing up in a small town very far away from any city then moving to a city as an adult. Which, you live in New York but grew up in Rogersville, Missouri and I looked it up and it's even smaller than my hometown. Do you think there's a connection there? Between experiencing a city as an adult who grew up in a small town, how you're more open to experience because it's still relatively fresh?
SW: That's an interesting theory! I remember my first time in New York, being on the subway and a Mariachi band got on board in full costume, the whole shebang, and everyone on the train was just staring at the ground or scrolling through their phones while I was giggling, taking pictures, and giving them money. Maybe there is something to the rural upbringing to urban living pipeline. My high school boyfriend calls me "the goth Kimmy Schmidt."
BC: I guess this touches on something else I wanted to ask you about: I feel like the speaker of the poems is more concerned with contextualizing the outside world within rather than projecting an inside world out. Especially with the lines, “i made a point to look / at the leaves by your gate / and to remember them / exactly as they were / and not as I hoped / they would be” There’s no pretension of projecting feelings onto the situation but the other way around, taking what is outside and making it into feelings inside.
SW: I think that's a goal of mine. I have a tendency to romanticize people, especially romantic partners, to idealize them and put them on pedestals. I think that poem in particular speaks a little to my awareness of that tendency, though. Like, it acknowledges the desire to romanticize me being dumped for the first time while in Brooklyn, sitting on a stoop, but the reality is that the leaves were ugly and kind of haphazardly stuffed in the chainlink. It was gross. And being dumped was gross. And the idiot I briefly dated was gross. Sometimes things aren't beautiful, which is a hard reality for me to accept, but I'm working to get there.
BC: One thing that popped up a couple times in the poems that, each time, had a definite feeling of inarguable beauty and romance was LA, like it felt like a fantasy ideal. What is it about LA that appeals to you to write about it in this way?
SW: I knew a boy at the time who wanted to move to LA, and his fantasy of it is very interesting to me. Though none of these poems are about Ben Fama, just look to his book, Fantasy, which has almost everything to do with LA! It's a phenomenon! And I love LA. My favorite place in the world is Jumbo's Clown Room. The backyards are loaded with fruit-bearing trees, and everyone looks like a movie star. Pomegranates just straight-up grow there! And the beach! And I love driving. Here I am now, just like that boy, going off about LA.
BC: I hear you! The little amount of time I spent there, everything was like spiritually warmer and bigger? And I kind of liked the superficiality of it. But I wanted to ask you about the violence in the poems as well. One of the blurbs for the book is by Eileen Myles who calls your poems, among other things, “a little violent.” I really liked the lines “i wear happily / my little bruises / like joyous moths,” especially in relation to the little violence of your work, how it’s not always destructive. In fact, it often feels liberating. How do you approach commonly perceived negative emotions like anger and violence and how it relates to your writing and your life?
SW: I've been reading Bataille lately, so it's hard for me not to think of violence as a thrill because of transgression, or its approach toward the edge. But I think that, in terms of my poems, the violence is directed inward. I tend to be self-destructive, which I do find liberating. It's like, "Fuck it, today sucks, I'm going to smoke a cigarette and order a dozen cookies from Insomnia." When I feel angry, I want to listen to angry music, not anything that will cheer me up. For me, it feels good to fully revel in whatever feelings I have, even if they are angry or violent. In a way it's anti-combative to give into "negative" emotions, rather than to fight or control them. It's a kind of emotional submission. If I'm feeling something dark, I feel entitled to it and I'm going to let it course through me until it's done.
BC: That said, when I read “Doomsday” (a tamale / turned fragile / in the cruel passage / of time) I wondered: Are you getting softer with age? Are you the tamale?
SW: You caught me! I think I am in ways. After my mom gave birth to me, my dad started crying to insurance commercials. I think I'm going through something similar. It takes a lot to make me angry. And for the first time in my life, I'm considering marriage.
BC: Whoa! That's a big step! What does marriage look like when you consider it?
SW: It looks... nice. Quarantine has caused me to get comfortable with a quieter lifestyle. I honestly love being in a secure, healthy relationship and I never want it to end. I just keep listening to 90's indie rock and daydreaming about moving to a small town for an MFA program. I loved partying in New York, but COVID's got me appreciating and desiring stability in a way that I never have before.
BC: I've been seeing that a lot, people in relationships that might have become vague in time are all moving in together and getting married. I think it's a big part of what we're going through.
SW: Maybe it's my Saturn return.
BC: On that note: I want to talk a bit about the Quarantine Diaries. It feels like making art in quarantine is extremely difficult because we still don't know how to contextualize this experience. You do a good job of it in the diary format here because the diary format, I think, doesn't necessitate making context of anything but the events of day. How do you feel about this section of the book? Is it a good representation of the month and a half in which you write? How do you feel about making art during the pandemic generally?
SW: I love the Quarantine Diaries because they speak to noticing beauty in the quotidian, which is all we really have right now. It was a good representation of that month and a half! I remembered what seemed important, and that's what I included. I feel like the pandemic is different for everyone creatively. Though I am not doing well financially, I have a lot of free time and a lot of emotional support from my roommates, my boyfriend, and my friends. I'm not immunocompromised or at risk of losing housing. Some people are though! Some people have kids who they have to get through online schooling. I don't know how they're doing it. But for me, I've been able to be productive. There's been ample time to work on creative projects, and there isn't much else for me to do if I'm staying inside.
BC: I heard someone say recently that they're not surprised that government has been so cruel and neglectful and monstrous! as they've been through this but to actually be here living through it, to see that monstrousness, it's amazingly fucked to experience it. Do you feel your work is political? You have one poem that overtly alludes to politics in "There is No Ethical Relationship Under Capitalism (after RRW)" but how do you feel your political beliefs play into your writing?
SW: I'm careful about politics because I don't want to speak to experiences that aren't my own. But as second-wave feminists would say: The personal is political. I can talk about my own conflicts with authority and the way that political structures impact my life, but I am scared to ever speculate about someone else's experiences or to write about them as if they're my own. I'd rather just listen and think through the roles that I play.
BC: These lines stuck out to me, regarding quarantine: “it’s a cold world that’s warming / where people stay inside / & confront their ghosts.” Has this been your experience in quarantine? Do you think, for those of us who are able to walk out relatively unscathed by COVID, this time will have a positive effect on us?
SW: Yes. I've learned a lot about myself, and have grown in many ways. I would of course prefer a world where millions of people weren't dying from a horrible disease, but I hope that those of us who are able to come out on the other side stronger do.
for Abby Vasquez
All of our friends are dying but they are the ones to blame, so we shut up about it and sit outside at their old favorite bars, drinking set-ups until we puke. The bars are named after animals or phrases: Red Fox, Crow Bar, Haymaker, Lost and Found.
Our friends shot themselves in one-room apartments, jumped from bridges, hung themselves from garage ropes. They had dark hair, shiny hair, green eyes, red beards, brown eyes, dimples, scars, cellulite. They stooped when they walked, or danced on bikes, or wore layered sweatshirts instead of coats. They played drums, drank beer, bagged groceries, sat houses, or watched other people’s children.
Our friends killed themselves but told us about it first, for too long, first in the winters, then in the summers. Winter: bleak but soon over. Summer: swimming and cheap beer and too many Fourth of July parties. We listened, didn’t listen, stopped calling, called all the time.
Our friends had ideas. They liked Marx, they liked Beauvoir, they hated Ayn Rand or loved her. They liked Beavis and Butt-head and Cake and were in love with sad, sexy singers like Karen O. They spit when they talked, they had bad breath, they wore Gold Toe socks from Sears and Roebuck, or maybe just Sears.
One of our friends stepped off the St. Johns bridge but wore her red cape so that she looked like a capital A going down. Everyone tried to rescue her, or no one did, and we kept swimming, or stopped, or held our breaths, or breathed too much, or went silent, or said, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus when we heard the news, that all of our friends were dead.
The ducks are a pair—Mallards from the pond in the nearby park. Every evening, they claim the shallow end of the swimming pool, float in languid circles. They’re not threatened by the woman watching them from the canvas chair. They don’t even startle when she goes inside the house to pour more prosecco.
The woman is a divorcée—she’s lived alone in this house twelve years. Her grown daughters transplanted thousands of miles away. Boyfriends have spent the night from time to time, but there’s no boyfriend now.
The woman notes the elegant (pompous?) curve of the ducks’ breasts and necks. The male duck, with his gaudy, iridescent green head that seems snatched from another body, looks like an Egyptian god. The female, with that snippet of blue sash peeking from her wing: a beauty contestant.
The woman imagines the ducks are her daughters. Some instinct they don’t understand draws them home each evening.
Of course, even if this were true, as ducks, they wouldn’t recognize this as home; they wouldn’t recognize the woman as their mother. Ducks know nothing of filial obligations, and this is to be expected. This is an acceptable trait for a duck.
But: duck shit. In the water. On the cement around the pool. The woman worries about diseases.
Also, on the phone, when her younger daughter calls to say she can’t visit that summer (she offers up excuses like items she’s trying to pawn to pay off an overdue bill—How much for this? How much for that?), she tells stories of duck multiplication. Two becomes fifteen then fifty. When the woman’s older daughter calls to reprimand her for the candy the woman sends her grandchildren in the mail, she says of the ducks, “You’re not doing them any favors, you know. The chlorine is bad for their skin. They’d be better off if you scared them away.”
The owl is plastic—made in China. It doesn’t even weigh a pound. But when the woman walks out the sliding glass door, the owl in her outstretched arms, the ducks fly away before she is even certain she wants them to.
That night, and for many days and nights after, the woman’s only company is the plastic owl. Even after she hides the owl in the cabinet with the fire extinguisher, she feels its eyes always. They never leave her.