In the Heart of the Heart of My Country
PLACE
When it rains in New York the city is full but no one is speaking. There is no sunrise and no sunset, the day moves without moving and then it is night. Sometimes days of string pass this way, a cat’s cradle, a mushy impotent knot. Time itself starts to move this way, without moving.
MY HOUSE
The apartment on the third floor lives in the shadow of the street. Sun unseen collects lightless dust blown from car horns and storm. My body itself begins to turn to dust, to pertain to the world it inhabits, still, dry, breathing.
A PERSON
He calls from a midwest highway. An airport run, his sister. I can hear the warmth of his eyes as he pauses to read a message about dinner. Take out.
THE WEATHER
The winds have been here for weeks. They swirl eddies of garbage on the sidewalk. On signposts I put up stickers imploring passersby not to collaborate with ICE. The ink is cheap and comes off easily as I rub them onto craggy surface with my fingers. .
Later my nose bleeds in the bathroom of the restaurant with the menu in Urdu. Back outside, the sun is bright and the coconut man’s straws are trying to escape their box. He uses the same spoon for everything. To scoop peanut butter. To scrape the jelly from the inside of the nut.
WIRES
There is a window. There is a door. By the creek my cousin dances with buckets and radio transmitters. Colorful tubes shimmy in a squiggly mess on the ground. As they move the buckets over the tubes the radios sing: the motion of a creek, rain, a voice describing a flood. Over tacos they said their main hope in life is to be as open and as vulnerable as possible, to cherish people and making things. To not take any of it as a given.
THE CHURCH
The dying man prays in the darkened pew, his child sitting next to him.
MY HOUSE
The sounds of night without. The sounds of night within. I become a sound of night.
POLITICS
Oh, it’s too much, too much. Once I dreamed of being a revolutionary. Now I walk the park collecting small pieces of brush in hope of fire.
PEOPLE
At the Thai restaurant in a Florida strip mall the student explains the shooting at school that day to her immigrant parents. I was in the bathroom, the next thing I hear are the shots and him screaming. She was on the second floor, he was on the first. The shooter is the sheriff’s son, took the gun from his mother. Two dead, six injured, one in critical condition.
Her sister interjects:
I wouldn’t have been scared, I would have been relieved that I was on the second floor.
Then:
You wouldn’t know though.
You can tell.
No, you can’t.
VITAL DATA
My brother tells me that the ‘Assault Life’ bumper sticker with an image of a semi-automatic on the pick-up in front of us is a play on the local beach lifestyle brand ‘Salt Life.’
EDUCATION
Lyn Hejinian writes: Love is an unfinished form of history.
I think: Love is an unfinished form.
J said, when we were still so young, that love was a choice. I understand better now what he said then, but only just.
It’s possible not to be struck by lightning, or pushed on onto the tracks, or run over, and still love. It’s possible to love and not die by it.
BUSINESS
I see the price of gas flicker before my eyes. From a bench a homeless woman and a young girl discuss the shape of a bug. The palms are wildly contained. There are more car part shops than birds. There are many many birds. What appears to be a flamingo is in flight. They can’t tariff haircuts, just sayin’ says the roadside sign. I see a lone human trying to remain human, amidst barbarity, amidst this peculiar American sadness.
This flash nonfiction series emerged in conversation with Etel Adnan’s book In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country.
Leanne Tory-Murphy is a writer and organizer who has worked across the fields of labor and migration for more than two decades. She was a Fulbright grantee, a Social Practice CUNY fellow and is a recent graduate of the MFA program in Poetry at Brooklyn College. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Le Monde Diplomatique, Jacket2, and La Piccioletta Barca, and her manuscript, SEA ABOVE, was a finalist for the Wendy's Subway Carolyn Bush Award.