Edmond Dantès

Fac et spera.

I put the book down on the grass beside me. I had laid under the shade of a dead tree’s dream broken and at its end, awoken. My eyes crawled out from the darkness of the tome and into the sunlight.

‘For what?’ I wondered, ‘Have I waited all my life for a good equal to the evils done to me? Will I lie down once and for all and die before I am redeemed by love?’

Bound up like a Maidenhair tree, an innocent cruelly cut down in its first bloom.

Some protestor may have tied their life to this tree to save it from the fate of what it is become:

the cracked cover of a paperback novel,

the glue has started to crack away from the spine,

pages fall like the Roman empire

and poor jester, who knew ye? What tree were you, maid of maple?

A scholar? A well redwood tree?

A greenwood’s deaf dream?

It is hope that the logger will jam that breaks the soul’s back in the forest; that leaves one to wander in the wilderness of their grief.

What did this one hope for? This tattooed prisoner bound for all eternity with a reader as their guard?

It is the absurd contemplation of the crab; the irony of a tree with a tale of revenge carved into its bark; carved so deeply into its heart; it carries the lover’s lucid, wet dreams of another instead of lovebirds seated abreast. Who will avenge the innocent who have been so savagely slaughtered?

Ask the tree to forgive the axe who welcomed it to the woods for its handle; they must have remembered where they came from. Look at how wide the wood’s arms were open, so happy that men, Nature’s prodigal sons, were returning to their mother.

Matriciders mixed themselves amongst the woods and stole the roses apple blossoms from their bower, pressing their red hearts to bleeding; feeding their lusts for blood in their drunken bacchanalian brawls.

It passed in murmurs, the greenword on the wind passed to the evergreens in their mountain keeps, down to the meanest of mycelium:

The desert is encroaching,

slithering like to a boa skinned,

like to the phantom of a crocodile killed;

We are swallowed whole by a tear choked farewell,

goodbye bayou spirited away by the sea.

We are bitterly burning inside,

outside they cold-heartedly burn us as charcoal;

We are drowning in sorrow,

rotting to our roots with rage

from every range,

we are brought down to the lowest sea-leveled meadow.

And I ask, Dear Lord, my God,

‘What is man that you are mindful of him,…

‘You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;’

Can you say we merit an inheritance such as this?

Are you silent because you cannot?

Are you so bereft of speech at the sight of this destruction?

At the ravishment of every paradise picked to the last weeping willow?

Are you waiting until judgement day to speak?

To tell us you gave us an eternity to grow, but we persisted in crushing even the smallest of mustard seeds?

Will you tell us, at are story’s epilogue:

we are all one

apologue

and all we needed to approach the hem of heaven

was to apologize

and not chop down the world tree

and cradle the tiniest toads or turtles

that to bring back one who was buried

all that was needed was to plant one seed of kindness to ask ourselves:

What if we did not kill a thing for its fur?

Nor cause pain to make a pearl?

Had to prolong the life of an oyster?

Had to pray that with its last breath on its thirtieth year

that it uttered the smallest unseeded pearl on its tongue?

How much more would such a stone be prized precious amongst the people to have loved the being who had made it?

How much more would it praise our worth having lived with no more pain than the sprain of the ankle I took while hiking through the Watergap.

How gentle as a lamb would one be?

to only take the fur off the back of the beast to whom it had become a burden?

What is the whole world had to wait for the earth to quake for a diamond?

What a paradigm shift it would be:

No men chaffing the earth

no man getting under the skin of the earth.

No robber barons or coal barons or men crushed under boulders, laying in dead in the dust

Such things and others, I wonder

at these quiet beings that I can’t quite understand

Why we—

on this issue choose to be—

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Quieter than the page,

more dead silent than this traveling forest:

his tongue

like the hiss of licked thumb flipping between pages

speaks the everblue language of snakes,

so well red am I from sleeping just one hundred year wink underneath the eye of that shining prince,

the sun,

this summer

in Central Park…

I lifted my head off of my pillow book with a jolt and turned towards the sound that had woken me from my sunny, little cat nap:

My boyfriend had picked up my copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that I left sitting like a tent as I drifted off.

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We met at a Death Cab concert in Queens. He was working security and I was a volunteer.

I had come out from JC to Queens to work a Death Cab concert for a voter registration charity with my black duffle bag with the word “PINK” peeling off the side of it.

I was going to head over to a friend’s apartment over in Astoria after the show. So, I packed a sweatshirt, shorts, toothbrush, a blanket for sitting on the stadium lawn, and my traveling library (which contained):

The Tale of Genji,

The Patron Saint of Liars,

the correspondence of Camille Claudel,

J’étais un Black Dragon,

and some play scripts from the Drama Book Shop.

When I got to the stadium, I went around to the back entrance and got into the security line.

Who are you here with?

asked a tall, blond security dude.

I’m one of the volunteers for *********.

He looked down at his list.

Name?

I’m *******.

He looked back up at me.

Alright, open your bag, please.

I unzipped it and he pointed his flashlight into my bag. I must have had over two dozen books in total.

He gave me a confused look.

…Why do you have so many books?

In case I get bored in the middle of the concert…

I said in a small voice, curling in on myself.

Okay, explain.

Well,…It started with my Chinese textbooks in college. I’d always keep one in my bag in case I got bored.

Then when I started working, I’d take a book with me to read on the train, but sometimes I’d finish them before I got down to the subway and I’d have nothing to read on the A.

So, I started carrying two: the one I was reading and the other in case I finished the other.

Then, sometimes, I’d finish my second, so I’d bring three books with me, but sometimes I didn’t want to read the two other books I had brought, so:

I brought a fourth so I would have a few options, but I needed a few more options, and now I carry around my reading list.

He looked at me for a moment and said, Okay, well, enjoy.

He motioned me to walk inside.

I headed over to the concession area to meet the other women I’d be volunteering with and we set up the tent.

An hour or two later, when the back gates had closed, but before the crowds were coming in, he came over and started talking to me.

How long have you been doing this for?

Do you like the band?

What do you do for work?

What got you into this?

Oh, you do it because you’re broke and still want to go out for the night?

Do you want to go out with me later?

He talked my ear off until the concert started. You won’t get bored if you go out with me.

We met up the morning after at a coffee place. He got coffee with cream. I got a matcha oat milk latte.

He worked as a cop; the security thing was just something on the side.

Do you read? I asked.

He froze and the answer was obvious.

I thought you were cute and funny. He said.

I thought he was good looking enough for what I wanted to do with him, so I didn’t take him seriously, but I wasn’t going to throw chuck him out with my matcha cup.

We went out more often; he liked my punk-post-graduate academia vibe and I liked his face, his abs, and that he had a steady job.

We were seeing each other for around nine months by the beginning of the pandemic. My lease was almost up and we started talking about moving in together. I had said I love you by then and wanted to live with him in Manhattan, but we hadn’t known each other for even a year at that time.

I woke up one morning at his apartment in March. I walked into his kitchen and he told me there was a quarantine for two weeks, so I could stay over, but I couldn’t go to work.

I got a call from my manager that week telling me I was laid off. My boyfriend asks, Why don’t you just live with me?

I said, I’ll move in if you learn a foreign language, read two books a year, and go out for Ethiopian or Korean or some such as that once every few months.

I continued, People believe their children can do what they can do, can have the things they have, should go the places they have gone, and feel alienated when their children can do those things and have those opportunities that they never got to have.

Furthermore, And when we travel we’re going abroad, so they get to use what they’ve learned. I want them to go to college early, Harvard lets them in at 15 or 16 for some graduate level courses.

So, I decided not to renew that lease and moved in with him.

I chilled there for two weeks cooking with him, spoon feeding him a little French, and reading Thomas Middleton to him like he was a kid who wouldn’t eat his vegetables.

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“Do you like it?” I ask.

He opens to the chapter he was reading last night. “It’s alright.”

“Well, did you at least like Dracula?”

“Yes, my Lucy.”

My neck is speckled like Love is a Dog from Heaven

Dark purple grapes dripped in gothic wine

our love’s closest moment to tattoo

as evanescent as the black butterfly spreading

transforms a new moon into our ardor’s poetry

It is a flower blooming into a love that will become an arbor, evergreen

I know at first you pined,

harbored these feelings for me in some secret garden, alone

I know we will live even through Dantès’ infernos and hard winters

to stay with one another in paradiso

together even when our pine cones’ pine cones have grown old

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An epilogue to bookend this, our very bizarre and punny love story:

🩷 I love you 🩷