Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  …

  I was seeing a girl recently and while she lay on my bed she glanced around and she said, it looks like you could pack this place down with twenty-four hours’ notice, and of course it’s true because we are all itinerants now and everything I own now is three chairs a desk a bed frame a bookshelf two lamps I’d like to hold on to heaps of candles and two items of IKEA furniture that I’d happily leave on the pavement and never look back. Because IKEA inspires disgust in me maybe in the same way that Macca’s inspires disgust in the bourgeoisie, because IKEA furniture is first of all ugly, but the ugliness is connected to its greatest sin, which is the implication its owners are not sticking round, they are international students who will never get residency they are backpackers living on twenty bucks a day they are sessional academics meeting their students in the corridor they are asylum seekers on Temporary Protection Visas they are renters in investment properties not homes for living in they are students always in a state of becoming they are contractors not employees so that their maladies are their problem they are their maladies which will kill them in their service to being they are flat-pack coffin-ready bodies. And if you think I’m joking just go up to your nearest IKEA object and press on it at a difficult angle and watch its injury insult the substance of your life.

  …

  I am not a sentimental person but yesterday I cried like a fool talking to my best friend who now lives in Detroit, I cried when I realised she’d never knock on my window again just because she was bored at her mum’s place down the road because now she has got another life, and anyway her mum moved to Epping last year and my folks moved out to Werribee and one of my brothers and his family live in New York City and the other brother and his partner are still down the street but we don’t hang out so much and all the people that signify that I have a home at all are scattered around the globe around the burbs and the only thing stable is my belief, rock solid, in the redemptive power of the hot twins who work at the bakery down the road, A1, who have worked there forever and who demonstrate little interest in their customers beyond doing a serviceable job of bringing out the falafels and the pies. That’s supposed to be a joke but humour fails me when I think about it, me and my friend wagging school to get zaatar pizza there and other times after school to Barkly Square for hot chips and gravy, the gravy clearly not vegetarian, us sitting in the playground out the back, the yellow smell of dry grass cuttings, talking shit, and I mean that shouldn’t be a reason to stay forever, I still plan to leave one day too, but now she lives in Detroit among playgrounds she never talked shit in with me while eating carbohydrate-rich foods and I’m leaving soon as well, and who knows maybe I won’t come back either.

  Allen Ginsberg

  I nearly bought a second-hand copy of The Fall of America by Allen Ginsberg because I thought it would help me learn to write poetry.

  I didn’t buy it: it was twenty euros, which was probably fair but a bit much for me right now. Though later I spent more money than that getting drunk with my boyfriend.

  At the bar I bought a woman a glass of wine and told her I was a waitress/poet. Her fourth-language tic was to say yesyesyesyesyesyesyes all in a line once she had translated into German the words I was using to spin my bullshit.

  My priorities are all out ofline.

  Instead I bought a book of Boris Pasternak’s writings printed before the wall came down, stark cover design for four euros. I liked the cover, on which there was a quote, ‘…the only thing in our power is to avoid distorting the voice of life which sounds within us’.

  My lover from a year ago drew a line around her bedroom to protect it from me, its boyish mattress on the floor, her jeans tight on her tender. I didn’t love her enough to Haloby Beyoncé her. She didn’t stay over at my place the first time, which my best friend said was inexcusable.

  I am trying to learn to write poetry because my lover from a year ago wrote poems about me, using my words, and I felt I don’t know I felt like… I have started calling myself a poet in public—I felt that she nailed my terrible and not my tender.

  + because I hate essays.

  + because I keep fighting with editors, like. I went to high school I think I know what a question mark is?

  + because the comfort of grammar false freedom.

  Instead I want revenge. Anne Carson: ‘As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. / It is a chilly thought.’

  …

  The ‘voice of life’ which sounds within me.

  Allen Ginsberg is one of those poets I suspect may not be uncancellably perfect yet he influenced me inordinately. The queer yet regressive socialist type (I can’t help myself). Because before I decided to think harder about not failing university, I was a waitress/poetess. Before, also, I saw that all the other poetesses stand up

  before one another to read out loud, serious-voiced, hand gestures wild and rippling bodies. Which I found shockingly unappealing.

  Once I tried to smoke opium with a poet whose number one hit poem was about the streets of our city burning. The streets are on fire, he’d shout, or The city is burning, I don’t recall, and all the others at the bar hearing this would whoop while I felt the every cell jam up in my body. We didn’t get high because the opium was made poorly from a hippie friend’s garden. I think I feel something?

  His eyebrows were like McDonald’s arches and his mission was romance.

  I slept over but chastely and he said when I awoke he said I wanted to wake you up with oral. Oh. I don’t know. He bought me a mango. I took a photo of him in bed black and white in his undies but never got the film developed. Poetry was fun.

  …

  Instead of me he got with an artist whom he thought I’d love and I did in fact I was lustful but afraid of women then. I saw her at the gym her perfect body.

  The story was that she’d scream so loud when they screwed that the neighbours thought murder. I mean the things other women’s boyfriends tell you once they think you are one of them.

  What can I say. I never loved any of you.

  My lover from one year ago is a great poetess. I think her poems are funny. My boyfriend thinks they’re sad. But in a good way. Maybe he is jealous, I mean what if I fall for a woman again. They say in TV shows and the like that it’s ‘about the person’ but truly women are totally different. Better and worse at the same time. I like how imprudent guys are. They say ‘you can hook up with girls if you want to’ then when you do they flip out. It’s pathetic, which means it’s both touching and could kill you.

  The truth is I am averse to narratives of pure romance in the way that I am averse to the avant-garde. In the sense that I am averse to that which is removed from its context. Poetry is often this. So is critical theory. Sorry.

  On the news I saw the dead body of a gunman. Supine mass of sinew. Warm blood almost still now in its veins, a journalist gazing hawk like from above. Watching this I stretched my right forearm to ease the delicate tendon within. Things outside the closed glove of language. Like slow-moving blood. Like looking from above.

  Amiri Baraka said that art is the endless expression of birth. Revolution is matter transformed by consciousness. Things like

  hot eruption of word jism from which the living being produced ecstatic fire interior life will always exist we settle for being craftsperson that devils use to drink blood art must be used as a weapon as the weapon against the rule to be cynical grasp the class struggle the struggle for production against so-called writers block poetry is independent of our will

  He said these things in such a way I felt compelled to set fire to my apartment.

  I did not set fire to my apartment. But I gave myself over again to the saint life of asceticism. No more straitjacket metaphors. No more superego shadows cast over. Confidence in art to drink blood, no, struggle.

  This is selfish but. I wish sometimes that I could get bent all the time. Start drinking at lunch and not stop till I pass out at six. This is not the kind of thing you tell
your therapist. If I had a therapist I would not tell her that. Instead I’d impress her with self-interrogation. Recover a childhood moment after which anything I did, would hate me still. You’d make a great therapist, she’d say. And I’d run home to empty out another wine bottle. Hide the empties in. The oven.

  You’d be surprised how unscathed I really am. Like a seal.

  I have begun again to chew nicotine gum.

  Unwed Teen Mum Mary

  I’m trying to get work taste-testing new snacks for 7-Eleven. They pay forty dollars per taste-test in the form of a prepaid Visa gift card, which will be handy for buying groceries or topping up my myki. To apply to be a person to whom 7-Eleven offers such precious opportunities, I must fill out a questionnaire in such a way as to convince their marketing people that I am a frenetic consumer of overpriced snacks.

  In the questionnaire, I select the statement ‘I work to live’, which is true, but only in the sense that to pay for the debt of living a person is required to work. This is not a ‘choice’ so much as a banality.

  …

  ‘How often do you make impulse purchases at 7-Eleven stores?’ the questionnaire asks.

  ‘Frequently,’ I lie. In fact I hate 7-Eleven and everything in it, in fact I almost never impulse-buy convenience-store products.

  Yesterday I applied for work running platters of canapés at the catering company I worked for when I was twenty. Yesterday I signed up to a mailing list for market-research opportunities. Yesterday I asked my friends with kids to pass my number on to any wealthy parents they know who are looking for help with child care or cleaning. Yesterday I applied for work counting votes in the upcoming state election.

  An editor emailed the other day, asking if I would contribute to her anthology on abortion, something with the word ‘choice’ in the title, which would raise funds for a national non-profit abortion provider. She said I’d get paid for my contribution. I thought about the kind of anthology this would be, and how the kind of anthology this would be was probably the kind of anthology I would pay little attention to—though I was flattered to be asked to contribute to it—because I am basically a snob, and because I don’t think that politicians intent on restricting or criminalising reproductive rights need to read a nuanced anthology on abortion written by mostly white, mostly middle-class women like me so much as they need to be taken out one at a time. A joke. That’s a joke. And then I thought about the number of 7-Eleven taste-tests I’d have to do for the same amount of money, how many hours of running platters of canapés to hotel corporation stakeholders on Cup weekend. I chose the two hundred dollars.

  When I think about the word ‘choice’ I think about how it represents a fantasy. An important fantasy and one, perhaps, worth protecting, but an unreal circumstance, really. ‘Circumstances,’ writes Anne Boyer, ‘are the stage on which agency performs.’ Agency as opposed to autonomy, which requires some degree of control over circumstances. For example, I didn’t choose to be alive and I didn’t choose to be settled in an overpriced city and I didn’t choose at age thirty to be lying about my love of Slurpees to pay for groceries from one of the duopoly of price-fixing supermarkets, groceries I cook up at my house that also serves as my primary workspace where I work at my several not-really-real jobs, and I didn’t choose to carry around a small robot that exposes me to radiation and listens to all of my words and bodily excretions—well, perhaps I did choose that purchase, naive consumer me, but without it my several not-really-real jobs would fast become unviable.

  —Siri, do I have a choice?

  —I really couldn’t say, Ellena.

  I didn’t choose my parents and they didn’t choose me—they didn’t choose my particular genetic code nor my penchant for feeling hard done by nor my rather negative attitude towards the hegemony of biological family-making. I didn’t choose to be a person who finds intolerable things that other people, most people—normal people—tolerate seemingly with pleasure and with ease. Things like handing over personal data to corporations in exchange for small product bonuses. Things like wedding registries. Things like the legal enforcement of helmet-wearing.

  I didn’t choose to get pregnant when I did, though I was complicit in the choice in that I chose to have sex that night, I suppose, in the mangled way that sometimes happens with a person you have not planned to have sex with and probably won’t again, and I chose to have it in such a way that made possible a slippage of biological material from one place to another, though in all honesty I didn’t think that the person I was with would be so careless or cruel as to endanger me in that way, and I chose to imbibe the several drinks that led me to this somewhat unglamorous affair. I did not choose the patriarchal condition of normative heterosexual hook-ups whereby the primary form of eroticism is the careless penile penetration of women and woman-shaped people in pursuit of male orgasm regardless of the risk of disease or pregnancy, but I did choose to exercise in my warped way my puny young-girl agency to ‘objectify’ guys with the aim of reversing the ways in which I had been fucked and fucked over by them.

  I didn’t choose to be too broke to pay the out-of-pocket for the abortion anaesthetic, which at the Royal Women’s was a hundred and forty dollars, and I didn’t choose the character of the girl I was seeing at the time, though the character of the girl I was seeing at the time was what had endeared her to me, and while I did not choose for her to pay for the anaesthetic, she did it anyway, because that was her character, and while I was getting my guts pried open the girl napped on her rolled-up leather jacket like a sweet punk-rock baby in the barren chamber of the hospital, and for this she is due my eternal gratitude.

  I didn’t choose to have zero emotional after-effects from that abortion, though I felt I couldn’t mention this too often or too loudly in case it seemed in some way to trivialise the emotional after-effects others experienced after theirs. More trivialising, I think, is the dominant cultural narrative I choose now not to abide by, the narrative of inevitable future shame and regret post abortion, as though a feeling of regret is worse than a lifetime of poverty, or being eternally tethered to a man you hate, or being dependent for years on a biological family you wish to be separate from, or simply being forced to do something you instinctively don’t want to do. I regret a lot, believe me: I regret my poor food choices and my poor work choices and I regret being born with the biological equipment that bears the burden of poor sexual choice-making under the influence of alcohol at age twenty. But in no chamber of my soul is there an inkling of regret about ending a pregnancy I did not want, and if I hadn’t had the legal choice to end it at the Royal Women’s I’d have done it anyway, I’d have rolled down a flight of stairs, I’d have seen a dodgy doctor, I’d have drunk poison, I’d have done it all, and I might have died trying.

  Because this is what agency is: it is doing what you can do with the circumstances you are dealt. It is choosing to do what you need to do, even and especially when your parents or your superego or the law disapproves. In my opinion, sex is not a sacred jewel, and poor erotic decisions are not something women need protection from, and motherhood is not holy. In my view, any effort to pair femininity with maternity with biological destiny with virgin births with earthy crystal-lovemaking is an effort to relegate the female form to a position of inferiority, to a state of constant need and gratitude and dependence.

  It’s all predicated on a founding myth of Christian society, the ideal of sexless maternity. But Julia Kristeva writes that the ‘virgin’ of the Virgin Mary was in fact a mistranslation of an ancient Semitic word for unmarried young woman. Conflating ‘virgin’ with ‘unmarried young woman’, she says, erases the young mother’s extra-patriarchal jouissance, evidence of her bodily joy and her sensual desires, and subsumes it under the sign of the male-controlled ‘virgin’. The mistranslation is said to strip pre-Christian societies of their matrilineal inheritance rites, and it strips Mary of her agency, too—her scampish, light-filled, unwed spirit—and replaces it with the sign of
the father.

  In other words, if the Virgin Mary had more correctly been named the Unwed Teen Mum Mary, we who inherit the moral framework of the Christian tradition might not feel compelled to trot out our narratives, our evidence that access to safe and affordable abortion is a moral good in that it is a material good in that there can be no moral good without humans exercising their agency in whatever piddling ways they can. Sexuality and impurity might not be coupled. Maternity might be understood as just one of the many ways a person can choose to belong to time rather than as a duty women with wombs have to tip themselves completely into the wellbeing and service of others.

  It is also true, however, that we who have inherited the moral framework of the Christian tradition have inherited a limited set of tropes through which we understand what a body is and what a gender does, and from within this fog we find it challenging or perhaps inconvenient to look upon the full force of the animal urges that course through us all. The animal spirit that offers recourse to say no, to say I will not abide, to say I will choose the smallest thing that has been offered to me, to protect me, to protect the others whose tender red organs have been taken, in name and in law, away from the law of their own agency.