THE NEWS REPORTS

Living a Feminist Life is a book I listened to in a car, almost exclusively during trips back and forth between the village in which Anti-Love met and the station stop at which I habitually boarded a train to the city in which Love met, or had once met, before my time.

It’s a good book to listen to. Like A Dialogue on Love, it uses poetry to interrupt the presumed (if false) transparency of nonfiction prose. By poetry I mean poetic techniques: meter, rhyme, homonym, repetition, iteration, recursion, and something harder to describe, some relation of sound to sense that keeps the reader perpetually

thrown.

But Living a Feminist Life is not a poem; it is an indoctrination.

I vow to give it to my next pregnant friend, cued up on padded

headphones (or ones made especially for pregnant

bellies—someone

must be peddling those by now).

Fuck Mozart: play this to that disaster in the making, to that

grotesque and unbearable signifier of hope.

FLUCTUATIONS

The continual back-and-forth, the never-really-touching-ground, can make it seem like life is happening elsewhere. And then sometimes you’re reminded that, in fact, it is.

My mentor called. I was crouched down behind the counter at the café-bar, rummaging in the disorderly shelves for a packet of artificial sweetener while my impatient customer, a stranger, sighed audibly above my head.

It was a poor connection, digitized and lossy. Holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder, finally putting my hands on a little pink packet and standing up to give it to the stranger, who seemed poised for defeat, I tried to decipher what I could hear of my mentor’s words.

“Not sure when,” my mentor said.

“Total mess,” my mentor said.

“Rely on the Manual,” my mentor said, and then, “but trust yourself.”

HEAT

The heat index is at 103 degrees—though summer is nearly over—in the city in which Love used to meet, and the apartment is a diagram of airflow under constant revision: fans set to “in” or “exhaust” in hopeful rotation from window to window, a sole insufficient air conditioner inconveniently placed over the sink in the kitchen, a small crank-operated skylight that may or may not be effective at letting hot air escape through the roof. I am looking for a novel that I suspect the bookstore might have in stock, so I put on as little as I can get away with in public and enter the street.

The feeling is like pushing a mattress with my torso. Each one of us on the street, pushing our own mattress: when we pass too closely to ignore one another completely, we peek our heads around our personal burdens and sneak an occasional shared grimace or smile, then push on.