The Rogue Wave

maryahornbacher74
Sep 11
9 min read

Purpose, poetry, and prose

Hey friends!

It's been such a treat to see the Going Solo community (going solo & being in community = not a contradiction in terms) respond with such warmth to this month's wide-ranging ramble across genres and forms. I've loved and appreciated your response to lyric essays, craft articles, talks on art and aesthetic purpose, and the first flickers of a new book that's beginning to mutter and stir.

In response to your inquiries, you’ll find a complete list of my upcoming classes, craft talks, and weekend bootcamps at the bottom of this post, along with a few words on writing craft, artistic purpose, creative community, and the amazing stuff my fellow Caravan Writers Collective instructors have coming up.

But this week here on Going Solo, in the spirit of cheerfully saying fuck genre and every other boring silo, I'm sharing four short works from the literary no-man's land of hybrid forms. Some people like the term ‘prose poetry,’ some prefer ‘flash prose’ - whatever these are, they've found a home in the pages of some of my favorite literary journals, noted at the top of each piece. The third one is part of a collection I’ll be sending off to the publisher in a few months. There's a video clip of a recent live reading of that one, too.

See you back here for another big ol' genre jump next week. In the meantime, scribble outside the lines. Wreck the bed. Be the rogue wave you wish to see in the world. -m

A Peck of Beets

Originally published in Gulf Coast (Barthelme Prize in Short Prose).

My second husband once walked into the house by the lake, carrying a very large basket of beets. They were freshly picked, dusty with dirt. I said, What is that. He said, These are beets. I said, Why have you bought a peck of beets. He said, It’s only a half-peck. We paused so he could think of a reason for having bought the beets. Finally he said, The girl at the farmer’s market was very persuasive, I felt sorry for her. I replied, No. The girl at the farmer’s market was very pretty. She felt sorry for you. No, he said, flushing the way he did, all the way from his chin to the top of his balding head over which he had taken to combing the remaining strands of his hair, and I said, without thinking, You look like a beet. He said, You’re so cold. Why are you so cold. How can a woman be so cold as you. Why are you never happy. You ruin everything. I was surprised by his reaction, but did not disagree. We kept the beets in the cellar, which is where beets should go, I suppose.

Excerpt from a Conversation on Metaphor/ A Seduction

Originally published in Arts & Letters.

A friend of mine tells me that sometimes things break into atoms; not literally of course, though of course things break into atoms all the time; but she means she’ll be sitting there at dinner with her lover, and the lover will suddenly disintegrate, become particulate, atomic, each proton visible, trembling, nuclei spinning, or doing whatever nuclei do; quarks, anyway, spin, at a rate so great the integer that represents their speed is infinitesimally small, almost impossible to see with the naked eye, but not if you’re my friend, who sees things differently, and knows the names of the quarks, because I told her; I thought it might be useful information to have. The names of quarks are as follows: Top, Bottom, Up, Down, Charm, and Strange, though my friend the physicist told me recently that their names are not real names, the kind that are intended to signify something about the quark; there is no quality of charm to the quark named Charm, or strangeness to Strange; I had assumed the quarks would have names that meant something, because they’re so poetic, but she said sternly, No, they mean nothing. I said, Then they are not like tides. And she said, No, they are not like tides. I also know the names of tides: there are five types: oceanic, earth, internal, atmospheric, and galactic tides. This last of course refers to tides of stars, the riptides and currents that crash on shores of space, the cosmological patterns of ripple and pull. I said to my friend the physicist, How is that not a metaphor for something. She said, It’s just not. She showed me a picture on her computer: a pink and orange amorphous shape positioned on a grid. She said, This is dark matter. Well, not dark matter itself but, more precisely, an inexact representation of the position of dark matter in space. I said, trying to trick her, catch her in some kind of net or web of metaphor, tangle her up in sheets of stars, discontain her, disperse her, make her atomic or subatomic, send her spinning outward in all directions at once; and then all at once I saw that she was beautiful; and I said, What is dark matter, anyway? Probably a particle, she said. I said, But what if it’s not? She said with great satisfaction, Then it’s something else. And I saw that she was glowing a little, in the rainy afternoon light, she was tiny, precise, hermetically sealed, and I said in a rush, Luminosity is constant regardless of distance, and she lifted her face and said to me Yes. And I said, Total radiant energy and apparent light, and she said again Yes, and I said, Dark matter is inferred from its effects, and she sighed, Yes, and her eyes drifted closed, and her light intensified enormously, and gradually she became somewhat diffuse.

She Bats Her Lashes at Some Bitch

From Plausible Deniability: Proses (forthcoming - stay tuned).

She's out there still. I know it. I can feel it, almost smell her skin like I can smell snow. She smelled dusty, hidden, like those old dark apartments with the warped wood floors, those brownstone walkups that faced the alley, not the street, never got any light. Years later, I went to get a friend who'd lost his mind, texted me that his palms were bleeding. I said did you cut yourself, grab the wrong end of a knife. He said, No, they're stigmata. I went to get him, pulled into the alley, walked up the back stairs of the brownstone, knocked on the scarred wood door. Jiggled the doorknob, called his name. Waited a second. Picked the lock. Walked in, there he was on the floor, slouched like a movie star poster, leaning, handsome, mad as a hatter, one leg bent. I put him in my car while he riffed on Baudelaire, I nodded while I buckled him in, I disagreed slightly with a minor point on Blake. Drove him to the ER, they said who's this, I said it's my brother, he wasn't. On the way, in a flash of clarity and shame, he interrupted himself to say, I'm sorry. I stink. I said you don't. You smell like an old apartment, maybe. But you don't stink. She smelled like the apartment she shared with that guy - nice guy named Alan, maybe, or Craig. He was gentle with her, always scooping her up from her nest on the couch, carrying her to the bathroom, stripping her down, setting her in the tub. Washing her feet while she cried. There are lots of ways to love.

She married him after we had that fight in her best friend's guest room bed. We were high anyway, who knows what we said, what I said. The gist of it I think was she said I love you and I said no. What she meant was I want to keep you. What I meant was no. That night, the cops showed up, knocked on the door while we were getting high. I'm no good on weed - paranoid, scared, which I never was drunk. It was summer in the desert - the windows were open, the door was open, everything was the raucous sound of crickets, everything felt like the hunger you get for the slightest breeze through a screen, the desperation of thanks you feel when it comes, the craving that lives in you forever after it leaves. You sit staring at the blackness through the window. Come back. The knock on the door - the cops - we tried to hide the lighter, the papers, the pipe. The cops pretended not to see, tried not to scare us when they saw we were all young, all girls, and high. They said, Lock up. There's a rapist on the loose. I don't think they said it like that. I wasn't worried about the rapist. I could kill a rapist. I was worried about the cops. The record skips - stops - next thing I know I'm in the bathroom cupboard under the sink. They're knocking on it, trying to pull me out. I'm like a cornered cat, all claws and teeth. What the fuck did we just smoke. Hold up. The needle scratches the record, squeals. Somebody moves it back to the edge, the song starts over again. I’ma back up. Here's where it begins.

We were two baby dykes with buzz cuts in short shorts, both from the coasts. We met in the heartland, both of us too brassy, too ballsy, too loud. I couldn't take the pretty town, couldn't stand being landlocked, didn't last; she stayed the rest of her life. I was trash, but she was a rich girl, shaved her head to make her father mad, batted her lashes at me for a year or two till one night she came over, fixed my fucked up crew cut with her clippers, dragged me off to my own bed. I'm not saying I fought it. I'm saying I wouldn't have gone, but it was three in the morning, every light in the place was on, we were looking at each other in my bathroom mirror, she put one hand over my red mouth and said she wanted lipstick on her collar, turned me around and offered the bare skin of her throat. Her throat smelled dusty, mossy; her skin tasted sharp, like live wood.

Six months later I skipped town; she hitched a ride. I wanted out of the wet and heavy midwestern heat, I wanted the road and the ocean, I wanted west, I wanted home. She said take me with you, I'll go wherever you go.

We called it our Big Adventure. Straight shot down 1-35 to the border, right at the stoplight in Laredo, onto the back roads, heading west. She rode shotgun, drunk on love, on diners and road trips, cheap motels and messy sex on bedspreads with burn holes, years later she claimed that at one of those diners she ordered liver and onions to impress me the same way she read Foucault to impress me because she knew I liked liver and onions and Foucault, she choked it all down and smiled. We never talked about the fact that I liked liver and onions because I was trash and she was just slumming. She'd never admit it, maybe didn't know, but I knew.

That night we stopped off to visit her childhood friend; the heat, the racket of crickets, the cops. The bedroom, the sound of whispers and sheets; the window and the source of light; the fight about love in the bed. How many times have I had a fight about love in a bed. How many times have I looked at the window, checked for a latch, clocked the distance to the door. Maybe I sat up in a hurry - maybe she pulled at my arm, something got its hands on me, something was pulling me backwards into something deeper, something like water, something that was dark and heavy, that wasn't desert air and wasn't light. I left her there. I did. Her daddy must have flown her home.

We told that story for years, or part of it - the part about the Big Adventure, the part that left out the part that I never left the road, I never could stay away long, and she wound up in the pretty house her daddy bought her in that pretty midwestern town. She's up there now. I can feel it - if I turn and face north, there's some northward pull in my skull. I can still smell her throat: the dust and the darkness, the sharp tang of live wood. She's up there, still telling the story of her big adventure while she gestures with her wineglass and bats her lashes at some bitch.

The Love Poem Part

Originally published in DIAGRAM.

I have not decided yet whether to give you my feet or my hands, or my tongue. You have already taken the words, pulled them from my mouth like a string of pearls. I am left with no language, only an intricate set of gestures. I will be in charge of gestures. You can steer the boat. No, I will steer the boat, and you can sing. I will wear a captain’s hat and sob. This is not the part that is a love poem yet. I will get to that. Once I read a book about infinity. I didn’t understand it, but accepted the premise: that things tend toward chaos, centripetal motion, spinning outward from the source. This was when I was entropic, made of electrical storms. In advance, I should tell you that soon I will break into your chest and rewire your heart, and it will probably blow. I’ve never been good at the heart part. This is the love poem part. I will give you my feet, my hands. Cut out my tongue and swallow it, rough as a cat’s. All I have left are the gestures, and the dull bloody stump in my mouth. Kiss me. Come with me. I need you to sing.