The Quick and The Rest

The Quick and The Rest by Dana Crawford and Nathan ArmstrongCopyright © 2017 Dana Crawford and Nathan ArmstrongAll rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not bereproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expresswritten permission of the publishers except for the use of briefquotations in a book review.Written by Nathan Armstrong and friendsCover by Dana Crawford





ContentsContributors 7Preface 8The Porch Late Evening 11Spring Poem: When the Geese Return 23Shared Space 34I think we liked the end of Inception 46for very different reasonsLoss best reflected nocturnally, 59in the window of a train carLet’s Make it Instead 69Memory: Atlantis 82Sound/Space/Legume 92the first ride since the accident 103The One is the Good Year Pilot 112A Single Honest Thing 122 134Acknowledgements

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Contributors(In order of appearance) Dana Crawford Nathan Armstrong Seth Harper Andrew Krzak Catherine Blauvelt Simone Muench Dean Rader Jill Doub Stephanie Bassos Courtney Hooper Kate Later Jessyca Malina John Funteas John Armstrong Tony Macaluso Giulio Macaluso Jamie Carr Feller Ann Armstrong Kyle Johnson Libby Bachhuber Mike Armstrong Amy Obbish Andrew Foff Shane Currie Darrell Jones Tammy Armstrong Courtney Hrjesa Rose Dillon Jonny Armstrong 7

8 PrefaceDana and I have been reading poetry to each other since we met—it slows usdown, it resets our minds, it makes us laugh, it makes us wistful and sad, itmakes us sleep deeper, it makes us reevaluate ourselves. It helps us love eachother and the world more fully. That’s art, I know—music does this too, andfilm, and any other beautiful thing you might stumble across.Poetry is also unlike those, though—it carries such a different perceivedweight than music and movies. I can name hundreds of movies and albums,and so can you. But poetry can feel inaccessible, pretentious, and worst ofall homogeneous—a single unscalable wall dating back to the beginning oflanguage. That’s a bummer, because it has the same variety of brilliance thatfilm and music have to offer—distinct genres, styles, flavors, and practitionersas disparate as horror and documentary, as Gregorian chant and house music.I believe that what truly separates these things is perception—our willingnessto engage with these art forms outside of academia, to observe, enjoy, criticize,and internalize, without the constant sense that this conversation is beyond us.When I see a new movie, I feel qualified to relate my experience to my friends,and they are too: “I loved it!” “So sad.” “Such good explosions!”Dana and I wanted the people we know to feel that comfortable expressingtheir experience of poetry, and so we created this: The Quick and The Rest.This is our sappy love letter to the form, our prayer to a power we believe in. Itfeatures poems I wrote, with responses from dozens of people with all kinds ofexperiences: fiction writers, artists, better poets, funny friends, thoughtful smart

people, and people who felt that they had no business being a part of this. In thepages that follow, the poems I wrote are the framework for their exploration, andbelieve me when I tell you that they are about to blow you away. Believe me alsowhen I tell you that everything in here is exactly what we hoped for.We are very proud of this thing we made, and we hope you enjoy it. Whetheryou do or not, though, I hope you reach out and tell us about it—how it madeyou feel, what you liked, what you hated, and what you would do differently. Andtell us if the explosions were any good.Thanks, heroes.Our warm hearts to yours,Nathan and Dana 9

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The Porch, Late EveningThe Porch, Late Evening Nathan ArmstrongWhen I told Roger that I had never loveda womannot really, anywayhe wheezed and laughedand lit a cigaretteand said“I loved a woman once;a great grey turretof a womanas stiff and thick as a stanchionwith eyes as wide and slowas pelicansand shoulders as broken and slumpedas Tennessee.”I remember thinking that, perhaps,I could love someonewho could love someone like that 11

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The Porch Late EveningPart I Seth HarperAnother beer, another cigarette, and I say goodbye and tread warily down theuneven steps of Uncle Roger’s sagging porch. The night is moonless, the airthick with dew and the determined catcalls of aging, late October crickets. Ilocate the sidewalk within the void of a busted streetlight, turn west, and start forhome, my thoughts suffused with a kind of bemused agitation.Visits with Uncle Roger often end this way. We’re both predisposed tophilosophical indulgence after a couple of beers, but after the third or fourth,his musings take on a particularly poetic quality unexpected from a man whohas lived an uncomplicated life of steady weekday work and simple weekendpleasures. Roger’s the kind of guy who eats meat with every meal, whosefavorite activities involve bait, whose living room décor features not one, buttwo bar mirrors painted with beer logos. Yet every time we drink and talk one onone—man to man, as he would say—I walk away wondering if perhaps therehad been, in Grandma Janie’s womb, a poet twin whom Roger had absorbed.I pick up my pace to ward off the chill. There’s a frost warning tonight. Passing amatronly woman carrying in bountiful flowerpots from her stoop, I’m remindedof Roger’s love interest. I try to imagine her, but the image won’t coalesce.Thick as a stanchion. Broken and slumped like Tennessee. It strikes me that thissort of imagery only works until you think about it. A stanchion is just as thickas it needs to be to hold a velvet rope. And how is Tennessee, that most linearof states, the only one you can render accurately with a single brushstroke,slumped and broken? I’m thinking too hard. This is why I don’t read poetry. Ieither think too hard about it or not hard enough.A right turn, then a left, and I’m almost home. Maeve will still be out, I thinkaloud. Light from the neighbor’s lamppost throws a cartoonish shadow of myYamaha V-Star across our front yard. Tomorrow I’ll walk to O’Reilly’s and pick upa fuel pump for the old girl.Something to do while Maeve sleeps it off. Around two in the afternoon, 13

14 The Quick and The Restshe’ll stagger to the screen door and stare out at me, eyes red and drooping likea strung-out bloodhound. Then will come the apologies and the promises, thesame one’s she’s made a hundred times before. We’ll kiss and make up.We perform this dismal ritual every couple of weeks, always with great sincerity,so I doubt she realizes how long it’s been since I gave a shit about any of it.I said that phrase aloud this morning as I pushed a shopping cart languidlythrough an endless aisle of Halloween handouts, wondering if I could bringhome a bag of Reese’s without getting yelled at for spending money on junk. “Idon’t give a shit,” I said, nose in the air. A lady stocking “fun size” Almond Joysoverheard, and eyed me warily as I passed. It was there—surrounded by cheapchocolate, Air Supply wafting down innocuously from a speaker on the ceiling—that for whatever reason, it hit me: I don’t love Maeve, and I’m not sure I everdid. Which means it’s possible I’ve never loved anybody. Twenty seven lovelessyears. How can that be? Am I soulless, broken in some way? This questionstayed with me long enough to emerge unbidden on Roger’s darkening porchtwenty minutes ago.He said this in response: “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with you that a couple morebeers won’t fix.” I didn’t smile, and he understood I was looking for morethan a reassuring chuckle. He peered into the silver can in his hand and grewsomber. “I know what you mean, man. I used to wonder about that kinda stuff.Hell, I know how people see me. I know they look down on me, on my life. Iused to think, well shit, they must be right. They must know somethin’ I don’tknow. They’re all out there buyin’ expensive beer and makin’ sure they got thelatest haircut. Worryin’ about politics and a new I-Phone and all that.” His eyesraised to meet mine, and he continued with authority, gesticulating with the twofingers clenching his cigarette. “But here’s what I figured out: we are all partof the same whole. Every critter—slug to swan, worm to whale. Ain’t a one ofus worth more than another to the uncaring eye of the universe. Mankind is theonly creature that doesn’t understand that innately. Only man knows how to hatewhat he is. More than anything, that’s what makes us human—self-doubt. Itdefines us. So now let me ask you, son, cause I can’t figure it myself, what’s theevolutionary advantage of that?”I had no answer for him. I simply nodded gravely, and he proceeded to tell ofhis long lost pelican-eyed love.

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16 The Quick and The RestHe Told Me He Loved a Woman Once Andrew Krzak

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The Porch Late EveningYour Poem, My Thoughts, My Poem Catherine BlauveltFrom: catherine blauvelt <[email protected]>Date: February 10, 2015 at 11:50:17 AM CSTSubject: Your Poem, My Thoughts, My PoemTo: Nathan Armstrong <[email protected]>After I read this poem I started thinking about copies/stories/stealing otherpeople’s memories or at least existing in them—as the reader through thespeaker and Roger too! I love the line break in the penultimate line after“someone” and the question it creates. It complicates the description of thewoman and the speaker’s reaction to Roger’s thoughts—in a good way!Also the idea of telling, and the way we distribute and pick up feelings. Andall the meanings that spiral out of “anyway” in line three—all ways or an afterthought, moving on. This is just a rush of thoughts. Have you read JamesGalvin’s X? I think you would like it.The line breaks in the quoted section are magnificent. They read the way thewoman moves/exists—slowly, lumbering. And HOPE exists in the first twolines of the last stanza! I think that hope is the human connection here. Yourreaders hurl themselves into the last line with your speaker. At least I did. Iguess below is sort of a poetic reaction to your piece. I hurled myself into it too:Blauvelt=Blue field in Dutch.If this is not what you had in mind for this project, just let me know and back tothe page I’ll go! 19

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The Porch Late EveningWhat’s Not Our Now People Speaking Having Catherine BlauveltOnly I Was Unreal The day againdescribing sooner to mud Day pet Everylight on at home—looks an unset sun You. . .on you. . . me . . . like I . . .you . . . on Copies inmy hand before night-love Taking foreverwhile she picks up Time Breath wearing wake Rhymeswith silver Blue field Your mud me like NowI have mud lingering over lights Each vowelthe sky—a sun under sound This and heor she—me too! the tour guide Hear repurposedmots? Easy pantones Eyes Dye cut from thetake We make the tell Use isn’tIf hands in hands we do it doesn’t matterCloud matter What’s not our now Scene Undo 21

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Spring Poem: When the Geese ReturnSpring Poem: When the Geese Return Nathan ArmstrongA goose is a bruteon foot, hungry and violentand stupid--they stumbleabout like little zombiesthey hunger for breeeeeeaaaaaaadSpring obscures usdying ice cores;if you stripped me in Winterfor testingyou’d find a miserable huffingcombination of despair and desirehammered under into acold wide angerI am a different person in warm weatherkinder, eyes widerslightly thinnermore shallow, more contentI ache less, yearn lessI will take phone callsI will maintain eye contactI will smile at your dogin short, I am less myselfor more, dependingon your opinionof geese 23

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Spring Poem: When the Geese ReturnThe dark wood after the dark wood Simone Muench & Dean RaderThe dark wood after the dark wood:the skin beneath the skin: the doorbeyond the door: where we hideafter we go into hiding:because absence shapes an omen.Where there’s a hole, there’s a warning,conjuring of a vacant coffin.Don’t enter the forest singingto the dead; they only listenwith regret. We have lost much morethan vocal cords and rosaries,divination of winter wrens.Spring obscures us, dying ice coressecreted beneath fog-cast trees.From the Frankenstein SonnetsTitle by Olena Kalytiak Davis 25

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Spring Poem: When the Geese ReturnLovesick Come Without A Horizon Plunge. Catherine BlauveltIn full sunlight, nothing at eye-levelblocking me out. Two hues prove my eyes; treerot and violet-wheeze. Now, I’m standing inyour shadow’s mass. Clouds intersect colors.Deeper keys of blue convince artificiallight. My pattern canceled. The wind’s off tospring. Hours without longing you cloud fill.A mood ring. Gravity’s my thought. Grass un-seen, so in the freeze. I’ll dip my bare legs.A goose darker than light’s weight witnessingshade. You’ll see me again. What do I impossibleflock out? Sweet you this juniper chord.The grass enjoys but doesn’t own. The skyposing in blue expanding, follows me. 27

28 The Quick and The RestOf Leaves and Bird Bones Andrew Krzak

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Spring Poem: When the Geese Return3-1-1 Jill DoubWinter here is a cleansing, hardening period. When it ends, I’m reminded that Iam vulnerable and small without a puffy down suit of armor.When the sun thaws the things that have been iced over for so many months, itripens them and unleashes their odor. It never fails. Every year around this time,I’ll be walking to the train after work and a smell will enter my nose, lodge itselfin my brain, and unearth a certain memory that I’d have preferred to keep frozen,at least for a little while longer.The sharp scent of a human several days unwashed is enough to start a chainreaction in my synapses. The only person I’ve ever truly feared is very much outthere, undoubtedly close by, and almost certainly still pungent.When the sun is strong enough to create that wonderful baking sensation onthe skin, all I want to do is sit directly in its rays and bask. But when bodies arebared, other bodies approach. A private soak in the sun turns into an assault,and it feels like your fault for being out in the open with no protection. Maybewe should go back to using that opaque white sunscreen and hide behind athick layer all summer.In the warm months, people aren’t frozen anymore. They’re lithe and smelly andready for action. I just wish more of those actions could be good and decent.To let your guard down completely, smile at the world, and simply enjoy agorgeous day feels so nice until a cloud in human form passes over you.I am a different person in warm weather, too. I’m suspicious of your eye contact,and I will call fucking 3-1-1 when you let your dog off leash. This is my parktoo, damn it. Stop feeding the geese. 31

32 The Quick and The RestColor-Me-Happy Andrew Krzak

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34 The Quick and The RestShared Space Nathan Armstrong1When the breeze slips in the open windowand touches our skinand we’re wearing our softest shirt;when our homework is already done;when the coffee has cooled,and the cats stretch their pawsjust soclose our eyes for a moment:all this is acceptable.2We lie as quietly in the darkas batteries in a drawer.I hope to never decentralize our shared nervoussystems.I once thought that looking too closely at the seam,at the stitches across our veinscould lead to a certain type of death;on the whole, I prefer not to dwellon my insides.Remember: all the timeswe saw the whole thing taut,near tornand knew that we could destroyit with a word,could rip the threadsof history and affection;leave them for the moversto discard.

Shared SpaceThis year, howeverI saw romance in the labor,the patchwork attachmentbut I think:lean closeto let the tension outand add another stitch.3Inside the first thingis a fourth thingand she saysin the interest of fairness, I tellyou this: if you mention pogsagain, I willleave you. 35

36 The Quick and The RestCourtney and my friendship began shortly before Nathan and mine did backin the early ‘00s. She knows our history, and she knows the individuals thatcombine to create “us.” Courtney is someone with whom I can be my silliestand my saddest. She read beautifully despite a bug attacking her face. -Dana CrawfordShared Space is the only poem in this collection that is autobiographical—it’sabout choosing to love, and love more deeply, in difficult times. Also, the lastfour lines of this poem are quoted verbatim. To me, Courtney’s reading at ourwedding is the definitive version. -Nathan Armstrong Courtney Hooper reads Shared Space atNathan & Dana’s wedding, 8/22/14 Photograph by Stephanie Bassos

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Shared SpaceOn Laughter, On Loss Courtney HooperI remember the first day that I didn’t cry and how it unnerved me. I felt traitorous,murderous. I felt like Casey Anthony. But I never felt that way about laughing.We laughed the very day that Laszlo died, the day after I was cut in half andhe was pulled from me, blue and barely alive. There’s so little you can knowyour own child when he dies twelve hours old. He is simultaneously everythingand nothing in a moment, held in some perverse frozen chrysalis of abruptedpotential. And the albatross of being wholly unknown to him, of realizing that hiseyes would never behold me, his mother, is a grief that can’t be spoken. So Ibegan to create myself, to incant myself to him, to his spirit, to his existence inthe ether, and I started with my laughter.The day after we got home from the hospital, our arms aching and empty, Edgarand I found Truman, our troublesome but lovable dog, ankle deep in runny shit.His tail wagged back and forth, sloshing shit side to side. When you hold yourson dying in your arms and believe that it is the worst moment you will everexperience, know there is lower. Because six days later, when you’ve beendischarged from the hospital and it’s no longer heparin injections and morphinedrips and Family Feud on a television set controlled by a remote that can alsocall a nurse to dispense more Valium, you will be on the other side of thatinstitutional buffer from the real world, that real world that spins ever forwardwithout your child, and it will have a dog in it. And that dog will be flinging shiteverywhere.We took Truman to the emergency vet in Forest Hills, the same vet whereeighteen months earlier we had said goodbye to the first member of our family,albeit a dog, Scout. The vet took Truman back to run tests in her lab andsuggested Edgar and I take a walk, maybe get some coffee. I glimpsed the lifethe vet thought I lived and wished I was a person who looked as bleary-eyed anddesperate as I did because I loved my dog. But we nodded and walked to theStarbucks around the corner. 39

40 The Quick and The RestAt the counter, I slipped a Sunday Times under my arm after paying for ourcoffees, and Edgar muffled a laugh. He loves me like this, playful and wicked,lifting two- and five-dollar items for sport, drawing a penis in the condensationon the bathroom mirror, miming breastfeeding gestures as he rambles inSpanish to his mother.As we wandered around Forest Hills, I threaded my arm through Edgar’s andrested my face on his shoulder. There were so many moments in those earlydays when I needed to press myself against him, to burrow inside him, to feelsomething other than myself. To know it was us, that Laszlo was ours, thatthis devastation was shared, that two of us struggled to breathe in and outinside these new bodies, these new lives. An ache ran up my forearms, as itdid so often in those days. Edgar sighed deeply and said, “I feel like we’redoing the stations of Jesus.” I screwed up my face, wondering what he meant,until I understood he meant the Stations of the Cross. It was so accurate,and brimming with the things I love about Edgar, all full of confused religionand ESL-talk, that I erupted in laughter. I laughed all the way back to the vet.I laughed when my dog was returned to me like a canine Quasimodo, with ahump of subcutaneous fluids injected to prevent dehydration, accompanied by aprescription for Pepcid and a bill for $600. I laughed as I sat waiting for Trumanto be discharged and remembered the Pablo Neruda poem our friends had readin Spanish and English at our wedding: Laugh at the night, at the day, at the moon, laugh at the twisted streets of the island, laugh at this clumsy boy who loves you, but when I open my eyes and close them, when my steps go, when my steps return, deny me bread, air, light, spring, but never your laughter for I would die.

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42 The Quick and The RestPogetry Dana Crawford

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Shared SpaceOrientation Kate LaterMy orientation weekend at college, amidst other increasingly unusual collegeorientation activities, my house (dorm) sat down in a circle to play the namegame. As fifty of us sat cross-legged on the floor, terrified but also sure we weretoo-cool for this, the house mothers (RAs) explained that we should each goaround and say our name (duh), hometown (interesting) and preferred pronoun(what?). With no hesitation, people who were as new as me started goingaround the circle. My new friends of two hours turned back and forth to eachother frantically trying to figure out which pronoun we should each pick. The onethat sounds the prettiest, the one that I use most frequently in storytelling, … orthe one I personally identify with. Sitting in this room at an all women’s college,I didn’t yet understand why so many people would even have to choose (andchoose from so many different) pronouns.This moment will always be one that is frozen in time for me. It was the first ofmany moments to come over the next four years that grabbed me and shookme, hard, about how little I knew about the world—as college is supposed todo. The next year, although probably unrelated, I switched out of a major I hadplanned to study since I was four years old and became a linguist.Since then I have become acutely aware of and endlessly curious aboutlanguage and especially pronouns. Nathan’s use of pronouns in this poem wasimmediately striking to me. Some moments are singular and some are plural.What does that mean in a poem about the tension between being an individualand being an “us” and the work that goes into moving from one to the other?The couple shares one skin, one shirt, one set of homework. As you first meetthis couple you immediately understand how entwined they are as one. But theirnervous systems, although centralized, are individual and have a seam. And allof a sudden you grow to understand the tension, the stitching across the veins,across the two individuals. Their Shared Space. 45

46 The Quick and The RestI think we liked the end of Inception for verydifferent reasons Nathan ArmstrongThe tedium of watching a slow rotation:the grudging quarter turn of a boltwhile kneeling on the side of a highway,sweating, while cicadas hum in the scrubwe tighten a stubborn screw in turns.I’m indebted deeply to spinningnoiselessly in spaceit’s a function of the universethat I have always found charmingand perhaps a littlead hocbut ifthe universe is a perfectconical constructionspiraling down from the vastnessof infinity to the minutia of elephantand again from fingernail to ionif the twist we fail to feelis in the blueprintsa feat of engineering laid out in advancethen, well, I am surprisedinstead:knowing what I know of delicate workit seems to me that perhaps the first thing,whatever item on a great oak desksignifies the wholeof, well, everything,was probably set to a ponderous wobbleby the fat flank of a chubby cat in a work spacewho believed himself stealthythereafter, we have damage control

I think we liked the end of Inception for very different reasonsI find a devious pleasurein the idea of wild spiraling;I wish, on dreary Wednesdays, to becomethe reckless and gone spin of lost control;to see the bolt strip, the ridges dull,to watch a wrench spin free and awayfrom a tired handThere is a joyous tension there,relieved finally when a little top beginsto spin irregularly, to weaken, and fall. 47

48 The Quick and The RestWhy aren’t there Coke machinesin schools anymore Jessyca Malina & John FunteasThe massive boredom of watching a slow brick shot:the grudging quarter turn of a boltwhile kneeling on the side of a rusted playground,sweating, while summer music hums in the nearby prison cellswe tighten a stubborn screw in turns.I’m indebted deeply to toddlersnoiselessly in spaceit’s a function of the public school systemthat I have always found charmingand perhaps a littlecreepybut ifthe universe is a horrificapex constructionspiraling down from the bottom of a Mondo Juice Boxof infinity to the movements of a spotted leopardand again from appendage to ionif the twist we fail to feelis in the blueprintsa feat of ventriloquism laid out in advancethen, well, I am surprisedinstead:knowing what I know of lazy childrenit seems to me that perhaps the first thing,whatever item on a great teak desksignifies the wholeof, well, everything,was probably set to a google-worthy wobbleby the fat flank of a chubby child in a work spacewho believed himself fitthereafter, we have the Presidential Fitness Award

I think we liked the end of Inception for very different reasonsI find a devious pleasurein the idea of wildly streaking through a forest preserve;I wish, on foggy Wednesdays, to becomethe reckless and gone spin of a bicycle with no brakes;to see the handlebars spin, the wheels rattle,to watch a hacksaw spin free and awayfrom a fingerless handThere is a joyous tension there,relieved finally when a little bear beginsto spin irregularly, to weaken, and fall. 49

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