 Arlington Literary Journal an ejournal also known as ArLiJo, is located in Arlington, Virginia and is sponsored by Gival Press. The intent of ArLiJo is to feature a variety of authors/poets/artists from around the globe whose work provokes readers to contemplate issues, etc. The work chosen promotes understanding and sensitivity across borders, even if initially the work may cause one to take a double-take. Staff: Editor-in-Chief, Robert L. Giron Associate Editor, Sarah Fannon The Reading Period for ArLiJo will open from January 15 to March 15, 2018. Any work published shall remain the property of the author/poet/artist and for any previously published work to appear the author/poet/artist must still retain the copyright of the work. Please note that ArLiJo is an ejournal. Payment for publication is a book from a selection of books published by Gival Press. Books Available to ArLiJo Contributors NONFICTION: Sexy Liberal! Of Me I Sing by Stephanie Miller FICTION: Dream of Another America by Tyler McMahon Ghost Horse by Thomas H. McNeely Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman by Elizabeth Harris Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski That Demon Life by Lowell Mick White Twelve Rivers of the Body by Elizabeth Oness The Cannibal of Guadalajara by David Winner The Best of Gival Press Short Stories ed. by Robert L. Giron The Second Act by Tim Brown Barrow’s Point by Robert Schirmer POETRY: Poetic Voices Without Borders ed by Robert L. Giron On the Altar of Greece by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 ed by Robert L. Giron Songs for the Spirit by Robert L. Giron On the Tongue by Jeff Mann Bones Washed With Wine by Jeff Mann The Great Canopy by Paula Goldman Sweet to Burn by Beverly Burch Protection by Gregg Shapiro Honey by Richard Carr 12 Sonnets for the Zodiac by John Gosslee Adamah: Poème by Celine Zins |
Kailee Pedersen Winner of the 2018 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 110 Achilles and Patroclus in New York City, 1983 —for Jonathan Sing, muse, of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles— No, that’s not quite right. I’m not a Greek hero, like those white-marble nudes I pasted on my college dorm walls in the seventies, when I was full of good books and poor taste. I read Ginsberg, perched haphazard on the library steps at Columbia, told myself I’d stop cruising on Christopher Street, stop the wide-eyed morning flush of spare bedrooms and tangled hair, russet mouths opening and closing just as I had locked myself in my room, danced to Bowie and the Rat Pack, studying Greek and Latin measuring time in bottles of cheap champagne but I digress—in languages that haven’t been spoken in thousands of years, even—I’m sure you want a love story. That’s what you came here for, right? A love story, like the ancients used to play on their lyres eating grapes in Rome, cutting their hands off and nailing them to oratory podiums. Well I don’t know any love stories, but I know that years ago I met a very young man for whom I would cut off my hands, my tongue, commit treason sail to Ilium and back again, twice over. You wanted Achilles and Patroclus. Here’s what you get: two homosexuals in a crowded bar, the beginning of a bad joke slaughtering each other not with razorblades but with our teeth, hands, and the first night I swallowed lightning, the exact shade of his blonde, blonde hair and his thighs cut by the verses I mumbled against them, hot and sweet. Where did we begin and end in our tangled sorrows? We could have lived the nearest a young man gets to forever, but I am old now. I know better. Time has made me colder than stained glass, winter in New York raining freezing damnation I remember we held hands at Christmas. I bought a snow globe. We smoked cigarettes on the roof and his mouth was wet ash. In 1980 I put my life into a few cardboard boxes and drove to the Upper East Side, and unpacked in his living room—my Patroclus had a snaggletooth upright, and serenaded me with jazz. The best days: morning omelettes slightly burned on one side, newspapers with the perennial coffee stains— I stacked my books in a corner until the floor warped, and he hammered together a bookshelf for my philosophers and my dreamers, Menander to Mann. Here’s something they don’t teach you in high school Latin: the gods are petty, worse than the opera queens at 66th Street, worse than my mother’s frown when he showed up for dinner with a casserole and a velvet blazer. Aubergine. Our fights of 1982 were legendary, tempests in Central Park even on the driest days of the month, with a busted AC and ice-cold lemonade that evaporated in our hands he had the flu that summer. The gods would punish mortals with plagues, eons ago, so maybe that was my punishment for not defrosting the salmon, for buying the wrong cheese, for not saying “love” enough, in the way he wanted it and not in the way I did, a lacuna, a thoughtless silence. He volunteered at a shelter and made soup. He wanted to fight when I first mentioned the New York Times article, “gay cancer”, murders, beatings downtown in sultry bathhouses where I had once tasted sea salt and danger, submerging myself in the rip tides. He said there was “work” to be done, but what he meant, I didn’t know. I taught Latin at a private school then, that was my battlefield, eighteen kids in a small classroom talking about the permutations of desire in Catullus and on weekends we’d get calls that turned into elegies, funeral games, songs for the dead. I never went to the hospitals, but he did, maybe because he was braver. You see? They’ll never carve my name into the Parthenon. Rhapsodes sang about brave men and their limestone lovers, but I am not worthy of such poetry. He started keeping lists, filling notebooks with names of the vanquished and their untranslatable histories, sometimes he went to protests while I graded papers and said, no, I didn’t want to have a ceremony, no, I hated the attention, crawling in the strangeness of my own skin. He was an optimist. I could have been fired, and there he was making signs, printing flyers. Patroclus puts on Achilles’ armor, the most beautiful armor made by the gods to fight because Achilles won’t, he refuses stays in his tent by the hollow ships, with his hollow words. I played solitaire when he was gone, rearranged my books on the shelves according to author and time period and I ironed his shirts and cleaned just to still my hands for an hour at a time. I only went to one funeral: an old boyfriend from college. I didn’t tell anyone. His family didn’t come, so it was just me and a few of his friends, weeping, but I had forgotten the way I used to grieve. I threw dirt on his grave and washed my hands of him, and said I’d forget. But that night I looked at Patroclus in the darkness and I wondered if the gods were taunting me, like they always did, spilling our cologne in the sink, mixing up our shirts in the laundry. His favorite was the white cotton with yellow stripes, which I had bought on sale from a cheerful woman who smiled and said, For your brother? (I didn’t say anything.) On a blistering Thursday in March he rolled up his left sleeve, the one with the ink stain and there it was: a dark wound. I almost wish it had been Apollo of the silver bow who had cut him down, because I knew mercy when I saw it. He got the flu again, but he still wore my immortal armor, my favorite tie. He quit smoking and said we’d make it through. You wanted a love story. Here, take it: the disease loved him more than I did, and it tore out his bones. After November there was no more dancing. I brought him Chinese food from his favorite cart, and fed pigeons outside of our apartment with the leftovers he couldn’t eat. I started going to his meetings, until I didn’t because I had nothing to say to these people, who died of “undetermined causes” while I paced outside of doctor’s offices and wrote “family friend” on patient contact forms. Out of all of the guys shooting up in their Wall Street offices, or having sex with their secretaries next to the copy machine, there I was. Trying to make sense of the gods. He told me he didn’t want to go like that. Said he had better things to do than listen to me pacing at night, spending all of my quarters on phone calls to doctors and hospitals, and newspapers, and his mother. No one ever answered. But one day the sky opened and dumped water on everyone east of Park Avenue, and I knew it was a sign of the end times. I took the subway home in soaked clothes and I found him lying on the kitchen tile. Apparently he had been trying to cook me an omelette. So it was me then: I killed him, with the knife and the candles and the Italian dinners and the ambulance and the uncoordinated ballroom dancing and all the days I spent fixing grammatical mistakes instead of finding his favorite radio station or stapling his flyers to telephone poles or touching his blonde, blonde hair. I slept that night next to the orchestral operating room, and at last I understood the real dead language: not Greek or Latin, as I had been taught, but the strange dark harmony of breathing machines and the arcane glittering of hallway lights. I was allowed to visit him the next day. I brought an old book of his from the apartment, and a picture of the pigeons on the balcony. But he threw the book at the window, and shouted at me about nothing in particular. Patroclus dies because the gods take away his shining armor, and so I remember him naked, yelling. And I, swift-footed Achilles fled from battle, a coward. I was told later that he had died that night, with the pigeons and Oscar Wilde. I was not allowed at the funeral games. I did not send my condolences. Sing, goddess, of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles— there is no rage left in me. Achilles dies young and follows his favorite companion to Hades, but I must keep feeding the pigeons, rearranging my books. I kept his things, until I burned them. The gods are cruel, but so are the bickering couples in Times Square, so is the rain. They never say how lonely it is, after. I tell myself stories in the dark. So here: it’s not a love story. But this is the only story I know. Patroclus dies no matter what I do. Outside the gates of Troy, or in a hospital room. And when Achilles hears of his death, he weeps. But I am not Achilles anymore. You wanted a love story? You got ancient history. I’m sorry. Let me try again. Once upon a time there lived two heroes, Achilles and the horseman Patroclus. They owned between them a broken coffee table, a subscription to Playgirl, and the Oxford Classical Dictionary. They had an apartment in Ancient Greece (or perhaps New York City) and the 1980s made them gods— Copyright © 2018 by Kailee Pedersen. About the Author Kailee Pedersen is a recent graduate of Columbia University in Classics. She was adopted from Nanning in 1996. Her poetry and prose have appeared in New South, Arcturus, Midwest Review, Matador Review, and others. In 2015, she received an Individual Artist Fellowship in Nonfiction from the Nebraska Arts Council. She is currently working on a novel and a poetry collection. This poem is dedicated to her friend Jonathan Baker. |
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