Geraniums

By Laura Rink

My Armenian grandmother, who told us little of her life in Turkey, planted her window box with red geraniums, and now that she is no longer here to answer my questions, I wonder if the geraniums and their color meant anything other than a personal preference—a quick internet search reveals that red is the color of Armenian national garments and rugs, and what’s more, the dye comes from an insect, a cochineal, indigenous to the Armenian Highlands, and its use is noted in the Old Testament and records dating from 714 BC, and as my research continues I find the narrative of the Armenian people stretching back three thousand years on the same highlands, on a major trade route, merchants and soldiers, nomads and crusaders, the entirety of human history a tide bringing goods and war, and taking away horses and sovereignty, which is the story of my unnamed ancestors spread across some 200,000 square miles, three thousand years as mysterious as twenty-three, my Armenian grandmother’s age when she came to America, her life before hushed, her voice hidden in the brown and brittle letters spread over the top of the black steamer trunk as I search for my family, as I seek a single cochineal insect in a field of red flowers.

Laura Rink is pursuing her MFA in creative writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, researching and writing about her Armenian family and the 1915 Armenian genocide for her creative thesis and for her critical paper, exploring how authors write into silence, the private silence of untold stories and the public silence of suppressed stories.

Photo by Jeff Kallet.

In Concert

By Melissa Holbrook Pierson

I am watching an arty art film about an art band—their name is an adjective denoting relationship to a country, which is definitely arty, but in actuality they’re nowhere near as self-conscious as the people who make films about them, apparently, as if what they’ve made of themselves through no one else’s agency could enter the lens outside in and transform the person looking at them into an equivalent rarity, a patently failed hope—and it’s tiring, my mind trying to find some thread of narrative to grasp, first with index finger so the others may follow until finally I’ve got enough purchase to h-a-u-l myself effortfully onto anything resembling chronology or arc or, frankly, audible dialog, but the filmmaker keeps jerking the view back to his artiness (plus the sound sucks, like it was recorded in a subway station bathroom, which is maybe a tad ironic for a movie about people who make music even if it is possibly meant as a postmodernist wave at resisting the viewer’s puerile desire for “sense,” you know, like a commentary on words’ inability to hold intrinsic meaning, but I wouldn’t really know as my Derrida days are far behind me), when suddenly YouTube, or possibly Apple TV—I never know the precise locus of these problems, speaking of deconstruction—crashes, so I am left with a dark screen on which is suddenly projected memory: the night this band performed in the courtyard of a contemporary art museum, the cool evening pierced by green lights shooting from the stage, the whole thing unmediated by anyone else’s janky vision, and then I’m flooded with yearning to be anywhere this kind of revelation can occur, which is mainly when we are together in some huge soup of humanity, individuals subsumed by multitudes.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of five books, all from W. W. Norton, and has had what might be generously considered a lot of other writing in a multitude of places.

Photo by Melissa Holbrook Pierson.

The Eternal Bliss of Being an Object Among Objects

By Erik Harper Klass

Once in the city at a gathering of political activists and poets, a man I did not know, drunk as a fish, walked up to me and told me apropos of nothing of the waxworks museums of the past, in which people were sometimes hired to stand with the human sculptures, and the museum’s visitors would amuse themselves in trying to discern those objects of flesh and blood with their white-painted faces and their painstaking costumery, from the dead objects of wax that surrounded them, but what was not remarked at the time, and rarely since, the man, swaying, continued, was the strange, almost compulsive drive of these stand-ins—these false-sculptures, these living beings twice removed—who were allowed by the curators to enter these waxworks museums at night after closing and stand motionless with Napoleon and Marx and Gediminas the Grand Duke of Lithuania—to stand in silent, half-darkened rooms and feel the eternal bliss of being an object among objects.

Erik Harper Klass has published stories in a variety of journals, including New England Review, Summerset Review, and Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and he has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado, living in Oregon by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.