The Octopus Museum

by Brenda Shaughnessy

  These people are a category in and of themselves—a kind of people obligated to continually renew their licenses, registrations, residencies, identification papers, passports, bank account information, school enrollment, property deeds or rental leases, birth and death certificates, health benefits, medical forms and records, utility accounts, social security data, employment records, political party affiliations.

  These documents must be continually updated to protect the status of People of Color as people.

  These documents are and records are proof that dark-skinned people, brown people, people who come from Countries of Color or who have one or more parents from Countries of Color are people, and it is incumbent upon them to keep all records and data updated, renewed, and accurate.

  This is all for their own protection.

  There is a long history of fraudulence, misinformation, identity theft, impersonation, money laundering, forged documents, improper registration, multiple claims, and other illegal activity, and so vigilance is required to protect People of Color’s status as people.

  Legal offenses, such as criminal activity and association with violence, can result in the individuals forfeiting their access to this system of registration and renewal required to extend their status as people in perpetuity. If individuals enter the prison or corrections systems as perpetrators of crimes, they can no longer uphold the obligation of being people, and the status of personhood can be revoked.

  Outside the judicial and correctional systems, it’s possible to default on that status as well. Simply forgetting to renew registrations or any of the above documents can render questionable/null/void an individual’s status in the group known as people. Crimes are defined as any “illegal activity” and this includes any lapses in registrations or expired documents.

  5. REPRODUCTIVE FUNCTIONS AND MANAGEMENT OF MEN AND WOMEN

  Differences between men and women are primarily physical. Socialization, legislation, education, and segregation have codified, altered, and enhanced those physical differences, it seems, in the interest of people.

  1. People are physically born out of the bodies of women.

  2. Male sperm are required to start new human life, but sperm can be separated from men, stored indefinitely, used at will, without any need for the rest of the physical man.

  3. Female ova can also be harvested, frozen, implanted separately from the woman, but no artificial replacement has been found for the gestation of the embryo. This forty-week period of gestation can only occur in the body of a living woman. There is currently no medical or scientific research advocating the creation of artificial gestational systems.

  4. Women are required to make People

  a) this has been interpreted in two ways

  i) “women, inseparable from their bodies, are essential to making people.”

  ii) “women are obligated/compelled to make people.”

  5. Men are not required to make people

  a) this has been interpreted in two ways

  i) “men, whose reproductive contribution is easily and painlessly extractable from their bodies, are inessential to making people.”

  ii) “men are not obligated/compelled to make people.”

  6. People are dependent on women to continue making people. Such a small percentage of women are (1) of childbearing age, (2) able to bear children, and (3) want to bear children. Some estimate that only 7–10% of the total population are women who meet all three criteria to bear children.

  7. For the benefit of all people to ensure their survival and continuation of the human species, women’s reproductive systems—inasmuch as they are inseparable from women as beings—are of collective special interest to the people, and can be said to be “held in trust” of the people.

  8. For survival and continuation of the people themselves, the people are the Trustees of the reproductive capacities of women between the ages of thirteen and fifty. Women of childbearing age and ability cannot be said to have full control over their bodies, as they may not qualify as Trustees, if they are not proven to be people.

  9. This document seeks to discover whether women can be proven to be people.

  10. In the event that proof cannot be obtained that women are people, women will be held indefinitely (or until proof can be obtained) in a “pre-status” category. “Pre-status” status confers no rights of people-hood, which are deferred until the required documentation is obtained, received, and validated.

  6. CONCLUSION:

  Based on our research, it appears the definition of “human” is unstable, and so is that of the plural synonym “people.” Human parts may or may not be “people” and as “women” are a part of the term “people” they may or may not qualify in and of themselves. It has been discovered that a tiny minority of humans can legally, fully occupy the category of people (with most of the population falling in the subcategories of Special Status and Women) and this minority is deeply endangered, growing more minuscule as time passes. It has been established that women are occasionally people, depending on circumstances that can change. This is primarily because they are essential to the survival of the human species and therefore they paradoxically are (1) the seat, crux, and essence of people as well as (2) too essential in their reproductive capacity to be allowed full personhood—their bodies must be held in trust by the state (which confers personhood) in pre-status from ages thirteen to fifty in order to preserve the future of potential people. In the cases that women are also in “Special Status” categories as people of color and/or children, further contingencies apply.

  Honeymoon

  It’s so flat here you can see everything. It’s not romantic. Nobody can slip in or out in secret, and who among us has pumped the last worry through her heart?

  Collapsing into shade, I wish for more sons, endless daughters: a higher ratio of my people to other people. Why not want what I want; since we used all the air conditioning it’s become impossible to think things through.

  Can you believe your ears? All the electric music in the world has been turned into handbells. I wish I had a cushion for my knees instead of gloves to keep the handbells pure. We can get used to anything. That doesn’t mean we should.

  I went to a wedding where everything was outrageous but trying to act modest by including very goofy elements, such as people in bear costumes and gold nuggets descending from the ceiling, only to be jerked back up out of reach when people tried to grab them.

  Long ago, a matrimonial family collected a few eggs from each household in the village to contribute to the wedding cake. A pig for the dinner: a gift from a rich great-uncle. Shortly after, there was a period of department store gift services and electro-synth harps for hire.

  But now we pick dandelions to make wine, and pluck chickens to make fine the groom’s cloak. He wants large brown wings; he wants wolf pelt for his loins. He wants he wants he wants. There is no end to that.

  The bride is someone who has only ever served. No use asking someone who’s once had a true taste of freedom, whose eyes widened and whose pelvis thrust up unbidden. Better she be someone who might never know what she lost.

  It is as it ever was. How many centuries have brides been made and used in this way?

  How few centuries have let women be girls first, swirling as long as they wanted into their sweetness and sharpening to ripeness, only becoming women once full heavy love was their desire inside and out. Maybe one. Maybe not quite one full century.

  Our Zero Waiver

  Her head in my lap, looking up at the sky. I watched her face watch the stars, moon lighting her like a still lake. I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were; they could be light ordinarily but collected all the dark tickets to ride the night in peace, in calm, tonight.

  I br
ushed her hair away from her forehead. I don’t think she’s happy, but her worries have smoothed, it seems. How could she be happy? She came to us under an inhuman law and I have no idea what she suffered. She’s somewhere between thirty-eight and forty-two, and she had nowhere to go.

  We took her in. We don’t have much but we couldn’t bear the feeling of hoarding our one extra bedroom, since Nana died. We figured we’d volunteer for a minus-one/plus-one Zero Waiver, instead of waiting and watching the household rations be cut due to decreased household size.

  No, we aren’t so selfless a family. I’ll never know if we would have been. If things were different, would we have taken in foster children, adopted orphaned or abandoned babies? Opened our doors, arms aching to give love where love was needed?

  Instead of waiting for them to reassess our unit, for them to size us up for an assigned new occupant, we figured if we volunteered at least we could choose the category. That way we’d be assigned a woman between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-two (there’s a surplus).

  I was mostly worried we’d get assigned an Offender. A man. Someone who lied and broke down doors and would keep us sleepless. We couldn’t choose who’d come to live with us but we could avoid an Offender if we took on an Early Crone.

  We were allowed an EC because we’re not allowed another non-Offender man. It’s why we couldn’t take in our friend Paul, who needed a home. Our old neighbor Michelle could have been safe with us but she’s too young. Until age thirty she’ll live in the Young Women’s Space.

  You get someone who doesn’t know you, usually from another town. Someone who probably has to leave for any of the usual reasons—a baby is born or a family member is released back into the home. Sometimes it’s her own baby. Sometimes a sibling returns.

  There are unofficial “occupancy-matchmakers” more broker than seer. They know many people in a lot of single-family-occupancy housing, and folks tell them the news, the comings and goings. Welch was our broker.

  We gave her daughter reading lessons for a year as soon as Nana got sick, payment in advance for finding us a good woman of the right age and circumstance. It was almost too much to hope for to find someone remotely stable or sane. Show me one person who is these days—that’s a clone.

  She brought Amy to our place one week ago. Amy’s been crying a lot, and then stone-faced, and then apologetic, her misery genuine, her smile forced. She must have had a baby she had to leave, or the baby died. In any case, her milk came in.

  My heart broke for her. Nobody’s allowed to waste baby milk but fuck it—not everything can be salvaged, inventoried, sold. Together we went out to the back yard near the trees and lay down on our backs. I didn’t want to touch her. How tender she must be.

  But she propped her head onto the pillow of my lap, better to see the stars and moon. I sat up then, the better to watch her. My skirt was wet in two spots from her tears. Her shirt was wet in two spots from her milk. My own cheeks were streaked, my eyes mirrored, shadowed, by her shining ones.

  The night was celebrating its sparkles, moonglow, glimmering, showing off like TV shows used to show themselves at night, exposing themselves in our living rooms. She and I made no sound, said nothing. What would we say? Who could hear it in that loud night flashing its millions of bodies?

  Our Family on the Run

  Everything organized around Cal in his wheelchair. He can’t walk and I can’t carry him far. We’d have the wheelchair van, as long as we could find gas. Simone in the side seat, Craig and me in the front.

  Maybe spray paint a Super Soaker metallic silver to look like a real weapon?

  Load the car up with cans of enteral food for Cal’s G-tube. Maybe a six-week supply, plus a go-backpack full of cans, extensions, spare Mic-Key button. Three days of food for the rest of us. We’ll find water.

  Sleeping in the front seats, taking turns on watch. Simone curled up next to the gas can and ziplock of batteries/cords/chargers, with her one stuffed animal we have to worry about something happening to, her only toy.

  And what if we lose the car? Running on some side road to—Pennsylvania/airport/Atlantic/evacuation center/relocation camp/as yet unknown. Trying to buy a blow-up raft for four people. Can’t take the wheelchair.

  Our stack of euros to buy four plane tickets: can’t take the wheelchair.

  On foot, trying to get to a friend’s country home, promise of a bedroom. No way to call the friend for directions. A compass one of the kids got at a birthday party wound up under a car seat. Lucky.

  Lucky, too, Simone can walk—though she gets tired and I’d want to hoist her on my back if I didn’t have to save my energy to carry Cal when Craig’s legs give way, his back out.

  Cal, four foot six and sixty pounds of tween, who must be carried if we somehow lose that wheelchair. Or the wheelchair breaks, or is stolen, or gets a flat tire, or rusts.

  It’s red, a color Cal chose by smiling when we said “red” in a list of colors. No expression when we said blue, green, black, purple, or pink. Big smile when we said red. He had his choice and he made it.

  How strange that the color of his wheelchair ever mattered enough to anyone to offer him that handful of options.

  Simone is hungry. I give her a Clif bar (that twenty-four pack I bought for rushed mornings) and she drops half of it on the dirt road, which is covered in, what, bone dust or atomized drywall?

  She grabs what she dropped and stuffs it into her mouth before I can stop her. Why would I stop her?

  The side of the road is the well-known gutter of desperation always included in stories about wars where many people have to move on foot to the next terrible place.

  No matter what the emergency, whenever people are forced to flee you find, piece by piece, how their understanding of their situation changed.

  If you read the stories, you’re supposed to find abandoned photo albums, suitcases, babies. The useless things cut out by survival’s swift knife. Dead weight, long gone.

  You never find food, bottled water, working flashlights, live batteries, shortwave radios. It’s true, what all those stories said, it turns out.

  Eventually out of water and arms shredded, I carry Cal, Craig carries me, and Simone carries us all. Almost seven years old, she is so strong and has some Clif bars stuffed in a bag. The notebook with all our information is long lost.

  She knows where she’s going. How does she know that? She runs ahead and carries us, her heart pounding and breaking with the weight and strain of all of us in there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Gratitude to the editors and staff of the magazines and periodicals that published the following poems: “Honeymoon” in Poetry magazine. “Gift Planet” in The New Yorker. “Bakamonotako” in granta.com. “The Home Team” on Poem-a-Day by The Academy of American Poets. “No Traveler Returns,” “There Was No Before,” and “Are Women People?” in American Poetry Review. “Identity & Community,” “Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer,” and “Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence” in Berkeley Poetry Review. “Blueberries for Cal,” “Wellness Rituals,” and, in modified form, “Evening Prayer for the Humans” in Paris Review. “Wellness Rituals” was written for Jessica Rankin’s 2017 solo exhibition at Touchstones Art Gallery in Rochdale, U.K.

  These poems were inspired by reading Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.

  This book owes its existence to The MacDowell Colony (where I wrote most of it) and Civitella Ranieri (where I finished it). Gratitude to The Vermont Studio Center, Denniston Hill, Provincetown FAWC, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Thank you so much for the various essential gifts of time, peace, space, and/or funds.

  Appreciation and thanks beyond words to my colleagues and students at Rutgers University–Newark; beyond words,
too, is the grief of losing beloved Jan Ellen Lewis, our Dean of Arts and Sciences, who championed writers, who cared so deeply about supporting us and the work of literature.

  Love to those good eggs in my home community in NJ—I don’t believe they know how much they helped me write this book, in particular Kate Francis Hardy, Reubena Spence, Addie Morfoot, and Ross Kauffman. To Wendy Gould-Nogueira: you inspire me every day—how I wish you ran the world.

  Poets, friends, mentors, coconspirators who gave me hope post-2016 election: Robin Coste Lewis, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Natalie Diaz, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Mark Bibbins, John Keene, Jessica Rankin, Deborah Landau, Tayari Jones, Suzanne Buffam, Robyn Schiff, Ellis Avery, Monica Youn, Eliza Factor, Amy Herzog, Elizabeth Gold, Mark Wunderlich, Dana Cadman, Urvashi Vaid, Kate Clinton, Wendy Brown, Fran Bartkowski, Paola Prestini, EnactLab, and my adored Pretendettes.

  Two mentors who shaped me, Lucie Brock-Broido and Helene Moglen, died, and I didn’t say good-bye. So I’ll say it here, with an infinite thank-you. I know what I learned from you made me a writer. Grateful that you lived and taught. I was so lucky to receive what you gave.

  I cannot thank Deborah Garrison enough for her wise, true guidance, clear eye, and for always leading with heart and mind entwined.

  Admiration, praise, and thanks to Todd Portnowitz, Nimra Chohan, Kelly Forsythe, and Leslie Shipman for making heavy lifting seem like smooth sailing.

  To Craig: there’s no one I’d rather share kids, home, life, strife, self, and poetry with. In case of apocalypse: that too, I know, will be better with you. I love you.

  NOTES

  The title “Map of Itself” belongs to Craig Teicher, who lent it to me here.