The Book of Goodbyes Read online

  and thinking, and online found her faculty page.

  She never should have said where she worked

  if she didn’t want him to call her at work.

  He dialed and a mechanical voice said, “We

  are not available. Please leave a message.”

  What college had such primitive devices

  as standard answering machines? Where

  was she? Furthermore, what was this we

  bullshit? Did the voice know something?

  Was she seeing someone? It was just like

  leaving any other message except his heart

  beat differently. Had it always? Why yes,

  hello, you are no longer at the number I had

  for you. I spoke to some guy named Pete.

  It has been a while but I still miss you.

  This is pointless. Once he left the first

  message, it was easier to leave the second,

  third and fourth. He made a regular habit

  of calling her. It was like they talked.

  He told her about his student who, by

  his recommendation, won the Duquesne

  Fellowship. He told her about his reading,

  in the Lower East Village, the audience

  loved his poetry. He told her about his colleague

  who farted, regularly, in the office. It was

  always the same. “We are not available.

  Please leave a message.” The voice was firm.

  The voice forced him to leave messages.

  He told her about his mom who sent

  an Advent calendar with windows full

  of Xanax. He told her his mom always said

  he was a good eater. He told her to call

  and gave his number, though he knew she had it.

  Where do you get off changing your number

  and not giving me the new one? Not reading

  Endless Love by Scott Spencer? Not taking

  me up on any of my recommendations

  like when I recommend you call me back?

  He kept waiting for the tape on the machine

  to run out. Every time he called, tenth,

  eleventh, and twelfth now, he waited for

  the tape to run out. Weeks passed. He took

  a Xanax. He drank a beer. It was raining.

  There was a song. Someone said something.

  He didn’t put it that way on the machine.

  He didn’t say I’m stoned I’m shitfaced

  I’m calling because they were playing James

  Blunt in the Whole Foods Market. Instead

  he told her about the view from his office.

  The tops of roofs. The smoke plumes.

  The clouds. He was Li Po sometimes

  and Catullus others. He made sure to get

  sweet after he got vulgar. It must have been

  an independent machine, sitting next to

  the phone, on her desk in her office.

  So he was on her desk talking. This isn’t

  very nice. It isn’t very nice of you to go

  away and not tell me how to reach you.

  I’m starting to doubt the whole enterprise.

  He told her about a podcast and a movie.

  Once, after reading Wittgenstein, he left

  a message of silence punctuated by

  a nipple clamp. Sweet again. Thursday.

  It’s me. You check this machine. You and me

  both know it. The tape never runs out.

  Don’t ask any questions of me. Stay on

  your side of the tape. We’re fucked.

  I don’t love you. I’m sleeping with various

  women from the boroughs, professional

  and amateur. I miss you. Come see me.

  I saw a therapist. Her voice was like a cartoon.

  She wore pantyhose with tennis shoes.

  I said this is the deal. I’m beginning

  to doubt the whole enterprise. There is

  no one I’ve seen that you need know about.

  I had a bad dream last night. We died

  and came back to find each other in the

  Dulles airport bar. That is why it won’t

  go away. You took me to the Great

  Sadness. You look cute even when

  emaciated. We were going to survive.

  We fully intended to be survivors.

  All our poems went up in smoke. Us too.

  I’m not writing. I haven’t written since

  I saw you. I can’t write. The therapist

  wasn’t too worried about it. I couldn’t

  take her seriously. I lied continuously.

  Pick up the phone. You must be checking

  your machine. Your students wonder

  where you are. Your boss left word.

  Don’t you have appointments to keep?

  Stop erasing me. Keep this one at least.

  This is a good one.

  CURTAIN CALL

  ELEGY FOR ZAHRA BAKER

  Zahra Baker is missing. “I don’t know. You all know more than I know,” says her father. The news on five websites tells the story the same clausal way. A girl, who wears hearing aids and a prosthetic leg, went missing.

  Why bring Lacan into it?

  I dated this guy who liked to make unannounced visits. “Whaddya know,” he would say. “I was just in the area.” When we broke up, he said, “You must have had childhood trauma.”

  I called my mom. “Did I have childhood trauma?”

  Where is Zahra Baker’s mom?

  Zahra Baker was born in 2000. Her parents divorced in 2001. No one can find her mom. They are both missing.

  Wednesday. Poetry Workshop. Here I am again talking without thinking. “I have a fake leg and I saw this clip on the news about Zahra Baker who may be dead with a fake leg and it didn’t make me cry. It’s very hard to make someone cry in poems or on the news.”

  After I said the words fake leg, everyone in the class looked at my feet.

  I do not have bone cancer or anything that easy. People know what bone cancer means. She was ten years old. And, if she is still alive, she is still ten years old.

  “Zahra was last seen in her bed at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday morning according to her stepmother.” —Fox News

  “I am gothic and proud.” —Stepmother’s MySpace page.

  “Mr. Coffey, you like being in control now who is in control we have your daughter no cops.” —Ransom Note

  Her leg was found in the woods. They matched the serial number from leg to medical records. This is how it begins. Serial numbers on our parts. Only our doctors can tell you who we are.

  What am I doing with my life?

  The commercial starts with a celebrity. The celebrity turns into a potbellied man with a missing leg surrounded by empty beer bottles. “Be thee amputated, drunk and alone? Play Rock Star.”

  In the spring issue of Pony Swoon, Nadine Neeze has a poem titled “Lame Sonnet.” Hugh sent the issue. What am I going to do about it? Tell Hugh the word lame is offensive? Do I actually care or is this another of my baseless campaigns?

  “You used the word lame on the phone the other day,” Josh says. “Sometimes I use it just to see how it makes me feel,” I say.

  In regards to the song “Pretty Boy Swag” by Soulja Boy: It is about a lame boy who goes to the club and because of his limp, which is called “swag,” all the women want him.

  I am watching Pawn Stars. It is about how much something is worth.

  How much would you pay me to say the name of the condition I have? Would I just need to say the name or would you require an examination? How much for the box of legs in the attic?

  I start calling myself a cyborg.

  I find a website called Gimps Gone Wild. “I could make a lot of money selling photo sets,” I tell Josh. “Probably a hundred dollars for a set.”

  “Don’t do that,” he says. “I would never do that,” I say even though I’m n
ot sure if I would do it or not.

  “Have you seen the Suicide Girls?” I ask Josh. He says, “No. What’s that?” It seems impossible that he has not seen the Suicide Girls. “It’s porn but the girls are really different with tattoos, librarian glasses, emo, indie, that kind of thing. If the girls on Gimps Gone Wild were pretty like the Suicide Girls then maybe.”

  What is pretty?

  I read the novel Fay by Larry Brown. I read it fast and pretend Fay has a fake leg. This is a recurring approach I take.

  Zahra Baker’s stepmother has been arrested for 1) assault with a deadly weapon 2) failure to return rental property 3) writing worthless checks and 4) some other charges not reported. Her father has been released after posting bond.

  In the Netherlands, if you are disabled, the government gives you 12 free sessions with a prostitute each year. “For women too?” Josh asks.

  A man at a coffee shop. I thought he had a condition that caused him to shake uncontrollably. Later, the emails roll in. “I got turned-on seeing you walk to the stage. I bought your book. Do you like making love?”

  The emails got so bad I had to forward them to my professor. He would read them and let me know if I needed a restraining order. Or a gun.

  If I enrolled on Gimps Gone Wild, I would wear a wig. I would dress up in a ball gown. Employ various speakers. Is it any different than poetry?

  Zahra: Here’s the drill. There have been so many laws against us. Laws that say we can’t go out in public and we can’t marry. Laws that mandate the splicing of our wombs and parts of our brains. I was going to lay it out for you in poetry, all the laws against us, but there were just too many.

  On the cover of the book Josh is reading: BEST BLACK WRITER. Josh says, “Bet that pisses him off.”

  Zahra Baker is still missing. I better write some more notes to her before she’s dead.

  It is weird that I have all these legs in the attic but they would not let me keep the real leg. The real leg they cut off and I guess it went somewhere like to a shelf or an incinerator. Sometimes I wish it had a proper burial.

  “Probably has to do with medical waste,” Josh says. “There must be laws.”

  Yesterday was fine. I was straightforward with them. I told them why I wrote the things I wrote. I read with a Native American poet.

  Someone asked, “Do you feel the burden of your identities?” I said yeah, I feel it. The Native American said he doesn’t think of it as a burden. His first language was Cherokee. He doesn’t speak it anymore.

  I am writing my acceptance speech for the Best Disabled Writer Award. The speech begins: I need some new words.

  Tell us. How is it getting around? It’s awful. You have to negotiate with so many people on the sidewalks and you can hear their thoughts, like “Hurry up” and “Why are you walking so slow?” and “Move out of my way.”

  Zahra: You’ll get better at passing. It’s a pain in the ass, I know. You’ll learn, I promise. Just make it out of the woods.

  NOTES

  “The Ugly Law”: Italicized text comes from an 1881 municipal ordinance, as cited in Susan M. Schweik’s The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (NYU Press). Chicago was the last city to repeal its Ugly Law in 1974.

  “How to Treat Flowers” quotes Spinoza’s Ethics, Part III, Prop. 59, as translated by Edwin Curley (Penguin Classics), and draws on C. S. Lewis’ chapter “Time and Beyond Time” from Mere Christianity (HarperCollins).

  “Affairs”: This is a substitution poem based on Austin Wright’s “Recalcitrance in the Short Story,” from the anthology Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer (LSU Press). “Affairs” has been substituted for “recalcitrance.”

  “Go On High Ship”: Geoffrey Grigson named Wallace Stevens “The Stuffed Goldfinch” for an eponymous review in New Verse.

  “Elegy for Zahra Baker” engages with the case of Zahra Baker whose remains were found scattered across Caldwell County, North Carolina, in 2010.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the editors of these journals where the poems first appeared:

  Badlands: “Poem for His Girl”;

  Cave Wall: “Go On High Ship”;

  Dossier: “Be Not Far From Me”;

  Failbetter: “How to Treat Flowers”;

  Fairy Tale Review: “Elegy for Zahra Baker”;

  Forklift, Ohio: “Tiny and Courageous Finches”;

  LIT: “Goodbyes”;

  Mayday: “Marcel Addresses Kate”;

  Michigan Quarterly Review: “Up Late and Likewise”;

  The Missouri Review: “Once I thought I was going to die in the desert without knowing who I was” and “For Big Logos, in Hopes He Will Write Poems Again”;

  New Ohio Review: “The Ugly Law”;

  Pax Americana: “Affairs” and “Decent Recipe for Tilapia”;

  PEN American Poetry Series: “Poem for His Ex”;

  Pleiades: “I’ve Been Waiting All Night”;

  Tin House: “Semi Semi Dash”;

  Wordgathering: “Café Loop”.

  Thanks to Peter Conners, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Michael Blumenthal, to the ghost of Isabella Gardner, and to the BOA staff. Thanks to the Fulbright Program, the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Delfina Muschietti for the fellowship and friendship. Thanks to Ana Lopez at the Patagonia Spanish School for making Ushuaia a less lonely place to live. Thanks to Clemson University, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the University of Cincinnati for grants and residencies to support these poems.

  Thanks to these writers for their insights on the manuscript: Tom Bissell, Sarah Blackman, Don Bogen, Jim Cummins, John Drury, Tim Earley, Okla Elliott, Michael Griffith, Joanie Mackowski, Kristi Maxwell, Bo McGuire, Catherine Paul, Michelle Santamaria, Craig Morgan Teicher, Gary Weissman, and Thomas Yagoda. Much love for my parents, Doug and Donna Weise.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jillian Weise is the author of The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, The Colony, and The Book of Goodbyes, winner of the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Tin House. Weise has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Fulbright Program, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University.

  BOA EDITIONS, LTD. AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES

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  The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress

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  No. 2

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  No. 3

  Living With Distance

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  No. 4

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  No. 5

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  No. 6

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  No. 9

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  No. 10

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  No. 12

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  No. 13

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  No. 15

  Next: New Poems

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  John Logan: The Collected Poems

  No. 18

  Isabella Gardner: The Collec
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  No. 22

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  Fiction

  No. 23

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