The Iowa Review

Barnhart, Graham

32 graham barnhartDays of 2009This is the one where he leaves her, wrecks his sister’s car after ten hours to Pittsburgh to see a girl who refuses because he seems empty. And this is the one where he knots his shoulders over flashcards like a fire in the frozen barracks. The one where he watches the inaugura-tion online whispering Arabic to himself. This is the one before his first war. This is the one where he grows thankful to God on the long stretch of Virginia pike, where he finds heaven is Highway 77 south-bound slack between mountains where nothing quits, and the massive hills are frozen at dusk, black waves full of terrible promise. This is the one where he’s thankful for heaven and hateful that it can only exist between things. This is the one where he learns how to savor guilt, how to make it last. The one when Charleston and DC and Pittsburgh rise and recede like sewing needles, the one where he passes out in the pews of St. Matthew, and thinks he’s never seen anything so bright, so bright but not blinding. It’s the one where he is wrong and the one where he learns to guess what he’ll long for before he gives it up, and this is the one where he gives. 

English

Days of 2009

Dewitt, Annie

Closest Without Going Over

Mueske, Steve

28 steve mueskeWe Arrive from Other WritingsLet us come to other faces, reasonably. Let us be a box of three.Let us be astonished by the difficulty. Plaid or puzzle, Separately. Simply. In cautious movements.Seeing a bell, a teacup: a violent languor in recognition.If I say cloud I really mean something like organ.Or carafe. Carapace. Caprice. More than thisA kind of vague yellow, a likenessBetween meadows. In rooms there isA center, a serenity of small bridges After battle, at certain hoursOf inattention, when blue is an equipoiseOf sky and river. Frame, urbanExtract, syntax: an alleviation of patternFrom the noise of ubiquity. The word, without.The word around, only. TravelingIn grains, like clouds of locusts. An interruptionPioneering through minutes advertised as Now.The eye is an organ, a camera. MountedLike a fish on spider legs. On closed-circuit television, All these things oblige like a tablecloth Or a turntable playing cake.The world assembled in a garden of folders. Music for elephants. Confessions. SeparatedBy interglacial events. Did I say church?I meant to say the opposite, weightless, from my tetherAbove the Earth.

We Arrive from Other Writings

Nguyen, Diana Khoi

80 diana khoi nguyenCult Leader The world without me       is the space in this room.       I dress as a dog every morning as if shaking off   a collision         the whip in my mouth.  The light shines brightly—         what new land is this?It is not I who inhabit the suit       but the suit that inhabits others.   I hide my real hound underground          give her  a man’s name  so I can hear her                howling.     Each day I become the dog I can abandon. Nothing can stop me.      A conduit for money   I give alms            eat cake     which deprives others of bread.  I throb     from their touch surrendering for a moment    to the kindness of a mask   afraid of children  afraid of their voices, too.At night, I whisper to my hound     I tell her:       when you are born you ride off    fall off          or steal.

Cult Leader

Militello, Jennifer

the iowa review 59How Feeling Too Much Is like Tracking orTaxidermyIf I keep my binoculars focused on the past field, something might arrive to coax the present field from its ghost.Only the rude meadows snow. Echoes die the way sheep lie down, shorn and in melancholy groups. I crouch small at the quick of the earth.When I act, it is merely a catastrophe. I create a fiction of my breath when I breathe out.When the soon-footed print of a mammal comes, the sound is like reeds as they knock at one another,like measuring cups nesting in a drawer.Wire me in a trap, but my tendrils will swell up.As my lover springs from the minerals, I spring from the fern-bitten dust. 

How Feeling Too Much Is like Tracking or Taxidermy

Kolosova, Vladislava

148Photograph by Olga Matveevathe iowa review 149vladislava kolosovaSiberian SunburnWe leave the train tracks by meters. We leave my last pair of walked-down sandals in a platform trash can. We leave a three-legged dog running after the train, clone armies of high rises, Vladivostok. We leave villages preserved in Soviet formalde-hyde, where people pin rinsed plastic bags on clotheslines to dry.We leave pines, birches, and larches in the reverse order we saw them on our way in; a village called Coal we passed two days ago. There are still 9,260 kilometers to rewind before Moscow. In our sleeper car: six square meters; two upper cots, empty; two lower cots, filled by Olga and me.We leave a village called Labor as I write “yes” on a paper napkin. We leave Salt-Dirt when I cross out the “yes” and write “no,” just to see how it looks. Thick black electrical wires pass our windows. We leave skinny sheep. Seals that I now know taste like tuna-fed cows. Teenagers carrying inflated inner tubes into the sea. Housewives using the last of the August sun to dry apple slices on the tin roofs of their garages. Men drinking moonshine in front of lopsided “Palaces of Culture” that were built for their political and social enlightenment. We leave the Sea of Japan and the Glass Beach, where four days ago I got sunburned behind my ear. When Olga runs off to photograph a seagull gutting an old corncob, her five cameras dangling across her chest, I sit on an empty petrol tin, try to keep my breakfast inside me, and reread Andrei’s telegram: WILL PICK YOU UP AT TRAIN STATION IN MOSKOW STOP WE WILL GET OUR SHIT TOGETHER COMMA KEEP IT TOGETHER AND MAINTAIN IT NEATLY IN GOOD WORKING ORDER STOP SAY YES STOP  I haven’t. I haven’t said no, either. I haven’t told him anything about it.“Vera!” Olga shouts, and when I look up, I am blinded by her flash.“I told you a million times!” I say for the millionth time since we began working together. To me, being photographed is the same as get-ting shot. With a gun, straight in your face. That’s why I always look so startled in photos. 150 vladislava kolosovaOlga says it’s not just the photos. That’s the way I look. We start walking along the shore to the Glass Beach—an ocean cove the size of an ice-hockey rink, covered in water-polished glass: bottle-green tiny pebbles, see-through ones, blue, even pink. The ocean chewed up broken bottles from the dumpster and then spat them back out, licked smooth. The sea glass is crunching under our feet. Olga’s steps are lighter than mine, even though my legs carry 29 years of life, and hers 43. The sun sets the red straw of her hair on fire. Olga is sometimes extremely pretty and sometimes extremely ugly. Most of the time she looks like a tripod for her camera, a lens always hiding her face. The Glass Beach is the last chapter of our travel guide Siberian Beaches 1991 for the State Committee of Foreign Tourism—the grand finale of retouching lakes and rivers into travel-brochure azure (Olga) and chapters about “wide coastlines, warm water, and a budding hotel industry” (me). Both of us know it’s putting lip gloss on a perishing dinosaur. The cove is windless and hot. When I take off my long sweater, I catch Olga glancing at the fly of my jeans, which I haven’t been able to close for a week and a half.“What will you do?” she asks, eyes on my belly.I watch a mosquito get full on my blood like a cranberry. Then I push a thumb against my vein, making it swallow blood till it bursts, like Olga taught me to. We leave rivers wide as soccer fields and mushrooms the size of baby heads. We leave mills. We leave meadows. (And isn’t it unfair that people like Olga could leave everything behind, and I couldn’t even leave behind one man, a piece of him following me across the country?) We leave pines, birches, and larches covered in snow two-thirds of the year; there are six days of pines, birches, and larches between Vladivostok and Moscow. We leave the beach on the Amur River, where I got sunburned between my toes; little mining settlements where people weave door-mats from nylon tights; fields of burdock that I now know make good toilet paper; tadum-tadum, yesno-yesno, yesno-yesno, and every strum of the train wheels pulls me closer to Andrei. Pigeons poop on Lenin’s bronze bald head. Children blow up plastic bottles with dry ice. A hairy man pees against a graffitied fence: “Communism? Capitalism? Alcoholism!”; “V.L.YJ.U.”; “USSR = you pretend to work + the state pretends to pay you”; “Dick!” the iowa review 151We leave the day, we leave the night, sometimes without exchanging a dozen words. The world outside the train gets left behind piece by piece. Electrical wires are the only ones that don’t leave us, following us everywhere, the only umbilical to reality. We leave bloodless villages, where inhabitants emigrated either to bigger cities or to heaven: Chilly; Installation; Garlic, where the old man grows exotic fruit. The old man is eating a peeled onion like an apple when he opens the door. He is a simple guy, he says. His Siberian mangos and Siberian papayas he saves for the guests. He is one of Garlic’s last three inhabit-ants. The other two are his dogs. Once a month the postman brings his mail, his medicines, and his pension on a tractor. He heats his house with chairs, window frames, and boards, cannibalizing the abandoned homes in the village.When we enter, he shakes my hand for a long time. Olga gives him a look that keeps him from taking hers. She’s not a toucher. Her body never seems to collide with anyone in this dimension, not even by acci-dent.“Does it ever get lonely?” I ask him.He gives a big smile, as if bragging about a remarkable local rock for-mation: “Oh! And how!”The old man shows us the fruit he grows in an old bathtub sur-rounded by artificial lamps: Siberian watermelon tastes like grass, the sickly Siberian bananas like raw potatoes. Siberian kiwis remind me of Andrei’s balls: hairy, delicate creatures one wanted at the same time to protect and squeeze.I am not homesick. Being homesick would prove that you have a home. Andrei and I only had a bed, his bed. There were no more words. There was inertia. There was habit. There still was sex. At night, we clung to each other as if we’d fallen in the water. But when the sleeping-mist cleared, we were as surprised as if we woke up with an actual life preserver in our arms.“You should try one,” says the old man, plucking a kiwi. They taste like sweet cabbage. We leave sunflower fields with blossoms the size of a round Armenian lavash bread. We leave cities vast and funereal. We leave honky-tonk bars where men are drinking vodka-hair: a double shot of vodka, then a sniff of your neighbor’s hair to kill the aftertaste. Three or four times a day, women with swollen ankles knock on the door of our sleeper 152 vladislava kolosovacar, dried squid and baked pinecones peeping out of their bags along with newspaper headlines: “After Lithuania—More Soviet Countries Demand Independence” and also something about a serial killer and a wheat harvest. We leave Ulan-Ude, where a month ago I woke up and thought I was blind, because a swollen bug bite pinned my eyelids shut. We leave Freedom and Frying Pan. Canada and Smutty. We leave dogs the size of calves and sticky-looking children baking sand cakes, like my daughter will, if it will be a daughter, if it will be at all. Now there are 4,630 kilo-meters to Moscow. Old men on the beach smoke cigarettes rolled from the torn pages of books. We leave Baikal Lake, the Holy Sea, biggest puddle on Earth. It has been pouring for days and Baikal is the color of sharks. Olga is swearing. “Convince internationals they could get their annual dose of sunburn in the Soviet Union too,” the managing editor said at the last meeting. With this rain, no photo editing would help. Olga brought five cameras with her, each for one of her photo projects (Siberian Beaches/toilet ladies/fancy trash/pelmeni/diary/me). But none of them are waterproof.On the third day, Olga says: “I saw a poster advertising seal shows.”I say: “I am a member of Greenpeace.” The only museum is closed. There is no television and I’ve run out of books. The seals are swimming apathetic circles in a tiled pond the size of two baby pools. The show master introduces them as Winnie Pooh and Scheherazade. The olives of their eyes look straight at us, wet and wise. “Smile!” the show master says, and the seals bare their teeth.“Count!” the show master says, and they make the right quantity of screeching sounds, coming from somewhere deep, deep down.“Dance!” the show master says, and they swirl in the water like two pieces of poop in a flushing lav bowl. There is a thin red thread between Scheherazade’s fins. She is men-struating. “I don’t have mine anymore,” Olga says. She sips kefir without stop-ping to take pictures. For two months she has been living on cigarettes and kefir, straight out of the carton torn with her teeth. “It’s been a year. They said they stop earlier in childless women. As if nature knew.” “She’s hurt!” a kid shouts, and more children chime in. “Hurt!”The show master pretends nothing happened.the iowa review 153“And now Scheherazade, belly dance!” he says, and she moves her body to the left and right. “Winnie Pooh, bring her flowers!”“Blood! Blood! Blood!” “They are on a date now!” the show master barks into his microphone. He puts on slow music and feeds the seals chunks of tuna. “Look, they are having a romantic dinner! They are in love! They are waltzing!” The seals are swimming back and forth in the water, the perfect caricature of a relationship, two bodies trying to move in sync, fins too short to really touch each other, one of them bleeding from her genitals. I wonder if life is easier for Olga: all windows of opportunity closed, no more pull from other bodies.“And they lived happily ever after!” the show master says.We leave log houses with shutters the color of Easter eggs. We leave Ghosts. Wires run next to each other, wires come together, wires drift apart. We leave hundreds of horses, thousands of clouds. Babushkas crouch in potato beds, collecting Colorado beetles in three-liter glasses. Men play cards, squatting their haunches in that way village men do. Meaty matrons beat dust from their carpets. Ural Mountains. We leave Hope. We are lying belly-down on a sun-warmed rock, me with binoculars, Olga with her strongest lens. Only a dozen feet away, a saker falcon is sitting on her eggs in a mountain crevice. Olga says it’s a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to get this close. For four hours, we have only moved to slap away the mosquitoes, afraid to frighten the falcon or miss the moment the male returns with the food. “Close your eyes,” she says.“Why?”“I need to pee.”“But what if I miss the falcon?”“Close your eyes.”I peed earlier, covered by the skirt of my dress. Olga is wearing dunga-rees without a shirt or a bra underneath—her almost-flat breasts don’t need one. I imagine her hovering near naked over the ground, pants around her ankles. I shut my eyes just enough to be able to peek. But in between lashes I can see Olga looking me directly in the face so that I have to squeeze my lids shut. Only then do I hear the dungaree clasp open and then the sound of water. In the two months we’ve worked together, two months of shared sleeper cars, shared rooms, shared bathrooms, I haven’t seen her naked. 154 vladislava kolosovaI never bothered to leave the room when changing, and if we came across a lake when I didn’t have a bathing suit with me, I jumped in naked. Olga always looked away, although once, when I was getting out of the water, I caught her taking my picture. She never swam and always went into the stinking train bathrooms to change, where toilet water often stood ankle deep on the floor. Only when I hear the dungarees click shut do I open my eyes.We leave train station bathrooms, where we used to wash our socks and tie them to our backpacks to dry. We leave pines, birches, and larches, pines, birches, and larches, pinesbirchesandlarches, one blurred splash of color. We are asleep longer than we are awake. With every day it is harder to care about the world outside the train. When we buy oily pirozhki wrapped in torn newspaper (“General Committee on the State Emergency Takes Over”), we are more interested in the content of the buns than in the content of the article. It’s cabbage. Three times.First time, when we shook hands. Second time, when she used my shoulder to prop up her camera.Third time in the Novosibirsk-to-Omsk train.She never touched me otherwise.Novosibirsk is hot and we are sweating Rorschach patterns into the backs of our dresses. At breakfast I hope Olga won’t ask me to come with her. Then when she doesn’t, I feel lonely and I end up joining her anyway. We wade between sand-breaded bodies, and then I spread out my towel and open my notepad. But work on Siberian Beaches goes slow: “Everybody knows Siberian temperatures can drop below minus 30, but who knew they could also climb above 30 plus?” I didn’t. I didn’t bring proper clothes or sunscreen. I never tan anyway. I pink. Then I freckle. Not those sexy freckles; the ones that spring up like facial hair on the upper lip. So best case, I yellow. I don’t even especially like summers. I’ve always felt the pressure of not using them to the fullest, not collecting enough warmth, vitamins, and beautiful memories to last the winter. The here and now never feels as big as it should. Summers are sandy, sweaty, and never have a toilet when I need one. By noon, I am bored. By one o’clock, I feel a twang in my belly I try to ignore. But still, even after six weeks of false alarms, and a pregnancy test I took eight days ago, I can’t fight hope. I spread the towel on my the iowa review 155lap, turn around to see if anyone is looking, and slide a finger under the waistband of my bikini, in between my legs. No blood.At two, I feel drowsy, but the car is rented in Olga’s name. At three, I crawl under a shadow, but it doesn’t help. Olga is shooting every moving thing, her camera clicking with Kalashnikov speed.At five, I become mentally incoherent for stretches of time that are long and ugly.At eight, Olga still hasn’t finished.At ten, when the beach is about to close, she talks one of the guards into letting her photograph after dark.I say, “I’m tired.”I say, “I need food.”When she offers me a sip of her kefir, I can’t hold it any longer: “Life isn’t a support system for art! It’s the other way around!”Home, after midnight, I feel boiled. My skin hurts when a fan breeze touches it, even in the places covered by my bikini. By 2 a.m., I have a fever. Olga gives me vodka with horseradish, but the alcohol doesn’t produce calm; it produces frenzy in slow motion.“Take your clothes off,” Olga says. “Lie on your back.”I pull my dress over my head and close my eyes. For maybe a second there’s something sour and cold on my skin. She rubs it in with swift fingers, circling around my nipples. Her face is so close to my skin that the ends of her hair dip in the kefir.It’s the third time she’s touched me, the last time.“Is there someone waiting for you in Moscow?” I ask.“Another job,” Olga says. “Mongolia. Turn over.”When she leaves, I look down at my breasts. They are the color of raw turkey steak; my nipples are swollen, hard. Some milk dried to them, as if breastfeeding has started already. My body feels dense and heavy.I sleep dreamlessly, like a cockroach.We leave the Ural Mountains, Asia, a village called Mars. We leave little paths overgrown with plantago leaves. Olga taught me to use them as Band-Aids. We leave huge industrial chimneys that look like cloud fac-tories, slag mountains; suburban three-story dachas belonging to party officials, keep calm, there is no obligation to be happy, everything won’t be fine, but it will be normal. Ten kilometers to Moscow. In the train corridor, a sprightly pensioner turns the knob on his portable radio: “Yesterday, at 11:45 p.m., several tanks closed on the White House at Krasnopresnenskaya embankment. Despite a ban on 156 vladislava kolosovademonstrations, hundreds. . .” We leave behind the welcome sign to Moscow and Olga turns to me. “You could come with me, if you want. To Mongolia.” We leave a burnt forest, the stems sticking out from the ground like a pincushion. We leave the last kilometers of wires that have chased us since Vladivostok. Black cables, running parallel, intersecting, intersect-ing again, tense, relaxed, apathetic, parting, coming back together, look there is a third now, not marrying, marrying in the end, Sunday sex, further, older, further, slower, slower, slower.

Siberian Sunburn

Levinson-LaBrosse, Alana Marie

the iowa review 65alana marie levinson-labrosseRising Poets of IraqIntroductionThese young poets, students I taught in a poetry workshop offered by the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AIUS), reveal a cross section of today’s Iraq. They are Kurds, Arabs, Yezidis, Sunnis, Shias, atheists. But the labels name only fragments of their identities, for they all grew up in an era of upheaval and learned how to rebuild, again and again, their own ideas of home, nation, and self. Their generation was born as the Iran-Iraq War came to a close, as Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal campaign began, as the Gulf War began and ended, and as the Kurdish Civil War broke out. Most of these poets have been forced to move—within their own country, to the greater Middle East, or to places culturally and physically remote, such as Holland and Sweden. They were teenagers during the 2013 American invasion. Those who were or came home navigated the South’s sectar-ian violence or the North’s unprecedented prosperity. The Islamic State invaded Iraq as they prepared to graduate from university.Their lives and poetry tell of their generation, their Iraq. Just by writing what they have lived, are living, they describe concretely the great tensions and questions of war, religion, statehood—and within these far-reaching events, personal lives go on. Parents divorce, hearts break, a cousin dies from cancer, and all of it is posted on Facebook. These poets look sidelong at it all. One poet writes not propaganda, but a complex account of how young people fall in and out of step with a country’s national project. Another poet writes heartbreak as an auction of innards, complete with auctioneer. For these children of contested and shifting ground, poetry is space—to contemplate, to speak honestly, to find empathy, to laugh. Poetry is a territory of the mind that is, as one young poet said, “unchanging, yet changing.” To travel the imagined geography of the following poems is to feel timelessness and uncertainty held in the same breath. 

Rising Poets of Iraq

Excerpts from "The Old Veteran", by Isa

Anderson, Maria

Cougar

Raphel, Adrienne

150From Kate Greenaway, A Apple Pie, 1886. Courtesy of A Celebration of Women Writers, Mary Mark Ockerbloom, editor.the iowa review 151adrienne raphel A Is for AWhat is “A”?The A is the root: it’s where we begin, the building block of any-thing else we want to say. “Everything begins with A” begins Gertrude Stein’s To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays.1 The alphabet is radical. Spell-casters have looked to the runic alphabet for centuries. The Ouija board relies on the mystical space of the alpha-bet as the medium through which we will contact the spirits. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Levin proposes to Kitty using an alphabetical code. Double abecedarians have the alphabet running from a to z down the left-hand side of the poem and from z to a down the right-hand side; Albert the Mason wears a fez, / But the fez is shaped like a cherry might be the first two lines in such a form.2 Philosophically, we go from A to Z; geographically, from A to B; tau-tologically, A to A. A is the universal affirmative: “All X are Y.” A is the first in a series of hypothetical things: A is partners with B. Everything in the universe is either A or not-A. A means acceleration. A is the most common blood group. Ace. Ampere. Alto. The scarlet letter. Q and. ❧How to Spell “A”A was originally a consonant. Ever since the beginnings of the alphabet, A has always been the beginning of the alphabet. In 1998, archaeologist John Darnell discov-ered rock carvings in Egypt’s Valley of Terror, about thirty miles north of the ancient city of Thebes, that proved that the alphabet as we know it was invented around 2000 B.C. by Semitic peoples living in Egypt. That first alphabet was sixteen to twenty-two characters long and based on hieroglyphs. This early alphabet was technically an abjad, or conso-nant-only, alphabet. (Semitic writing systems don’t have symbols for vowels.) The first letter, the Semitic consonant aleph, meaning “ox,” was drawn with the sign of an ox’s head. Beth, the next letter, was adapted 1. Gertrude Stein, To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays, ill. Giselle Potter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 2. See Cody Walker, “Double Double, Part 2 (Abecedarians)” in the Kenyon Review blog, December 30, 2010.152 adrienne raphel from the glyph for “house.” Though the characters in this aleph-beth had meanings, they were used as arbitrary symbols to combine into new words, not as rebuses. Neighboring Phoenicians picked up the alphabet and adapted it into a twenty-two-character system that, around 1700 B.C., began to be disseminated widely through commerce and trade. Eventually, the consonant aleph became the vowel alpha, and the aleph-beth became the alphabet.A can have several different sounds. For most languages that use the Latin alphabet, “A” represents an open, unrounded vowel, but in the Canadian language Saanich, the symbol “a” means the sound “/e/” as in “bet.” A’s are broad (as in all, wall, salt), open (father, rather, fancy in a fahncy accent), or slender (place, waste, nation). ❧What Does “A” Mean?Many abecedaries introduce children to potential adult lives. In early abecedaries, A is an Archer, and shot at a Frog; A is an Angler who caught a fine fish. Illustrator Oliver Jeffers’s A is an Astronaut afraid of heights. Innosanto Nagara’s A is for Activist. Delinquents lurk farther in the alphabet––D is a Drunkard—but the A’s tend to be exemplars. A is for ape, A is for ant, A is for aardvark, antelope, Australian pitcher plant. If Q is for Quinoa, then A is for Allergy. A is often delicious. Victorian illustrator Kate Greenaway’s A was an Apple Pie that B bit, C cut, and Q quartered.Johann Amos Comenius’s 1658 Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or Visible World, is a children’s picture encyclopedia that begins with the alphabet. Orbis Sensualium Pictus combines sounds and images to create a memory pal-ace for the child: “For the yong A b c Scholar,” writes Comenius, “will easily remember the force of every Character by the very looking upon the Creature, till the image being strengthened by use can readily afford all things.” Comenius introduces the alphabet with a dialogue between schoolmaster and boy. “I will shew thee all,” says the master. “Before all things thou oughtest to learn the plain sounds.” Initial letters relate to sounds, not objects: “Cornix cornicatur,” or “The Crow cryeth,” begins the alphabet, because the crow cries “a a.” (The Horse Fly comes last: “ds ds,” that is, “z z.”) By the eighteenth century, the letter “A” had replaced the crow’s cry as the beginning of abecedaries. A is first seen, then heard. “In Adams fall / We sinned all,” begins “The Childes Guide,” an alphabet verse in couplets that appeared at the beginning of the New England Primer. The the iowa review 153Primer, first printed in 1690, was the first reading primer designed for the American colonies. First published in 1687, the Primer was the first book that American schoolchildren would have read, and A is for Adam’s fall one of their first pieces of alphabetic knowledge.In John Harris’s 1813 tongue-twisting abecedary Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation, “Andrew Airpump asked his aunt her ail-ment.” Edward Lear’s Absolutely Abstemious Ass resides in a barrel and lives on Soda Water and Pickled Cucumbers. Edward Gorey’s A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. A is Aunt Annie’s alligator in Dr. Seuss’s ABC; A is an anonymous alligator in Alice and Martin Provensen’s Shaker abecedarius. In Kate Schwartz’s Rad American Women A–Z, A is for Angela Davis.According to Swedish law, parents cannot name their children without submitting the name for governmental approval. In 1991, two parents attempted to name their child Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116. The court rejected this name, and the parents were fined five thousand kronor. In response, the parents tried to change the spelling of the boy’s name to “A.” The court denied the change.❧What Is “A” For?“Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement. . .anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an From Orbis Sensualium Pictus, Johann Amos Comenius, 1658. Courtesy of Boston Public Library/Rare Books154 adrienne raphel African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal any annexation,”3 attests an antecedent assertion announcing Abish’s Alphabetical Africa’s “A” area.In Eunoia, Christian Bök writes each chapter with only a single vowel. “Awkward grammar appalls a craftsman,” begins Chapter A. The book relies on the alphabet to determine its vowel sounds: all sounds that get spelled with the letter “A” are fair game for Chapter A. Bök lays out the rules of the game within the game’s language: in Chapter A, we learn that “A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.”4Single A’s were found on Greek vessels at the sanctuary of Zeus at Mt. Hymettos in Greece. M.K. Langdon writes of an etched alpha on a fragment of an urn, “Single alphas are often found on objects dedicated to Athena, undoubtedly as abbreviations of the goddess’ name. . . . The significance, if any, of single alpha from Hymettos is unknown.”5A is for ox. “a / is ox head: / dark snout and horn, body blank as milk,” writes poet Orlando White in his 2015 collection Letterrs, poetic love let-ters to graphemes. “Originates from / measurement of animal to print,” he continues; “first as labor on landscape, / then on page as libel.”6Inger Christensen’s alphabet, a collection based on the Fibonacci sequence as well as the alphabet, begins “apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist.”7 The Latin for apricot is praecocia, or precocious fruit; it’s also been suggested that Adam and Eve’s apple was no McIntosh but a Mala armeniaca, or Armenian apple, or apricot. Orchard apples are typi-cally propagated asexually, through grafting. When apples breed in the wild from seeds, they will most likely look and taste nothing like their parents.James Merrill spent the better part of the second half of his life at the Ouija board. The Changing Light at Sandover, the five-hundred-page poem that emerged from these sessions, is virtuosic as only Merrill, or the vessel of Merrill, can be: he speaks with Auden and God B (Biology) and transcendental bats. The Ouija board gives him a double sestina. I once taught a student who told me he was cursed; he burned a Ouija board in the park, and deer gathered around him in a ring to watch. Ouija board dicta have a certain flatness, an arbitrariness girding the 3. Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (New York: New Directions, 1974), 1.4. Christian Bök, Eunoia (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009), 12. 5. Merle K. Langdon, “A Sanctuary of Zeus at Mount Hymettos” (Athens, Greece: Hesperia Supplements, 1976), 39.6. Orlando White, Letterrs (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015), 25.7. Inger Christensen, alphabet, trans. Susanna Nied (New York: New Directions, 2000), 11.the iowa review 155ironclad brilliance. Everything is as irrevocably true as a dream, and nothing is real. ❧What Does “A” Mean?A is generally premium: Grade A, A-plus, A-one. “A.1. Steak Sauce” was apparently so dubbed because King George IV deemed the spread “A.1.” A used to denote the lowest social stratum; now, it’s the highest socioeconomic class: from highest quantity of people to highest qual-ity of life. In batteries and bras, A is larger than AA, which is larger than AAA. If you’re a company, or a baseball player, you’d rather be rated AAA than AA.Why is A the best? Because it’s the top. In Metaphors We Live By, cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that we structure our world via conceptual metaphors; for example, up is good, down is bad. The 2003–04 Los Angeles Westwood Yellow Pages con-tains businesses like “A-Approved Chimney Services” and “A Budget Moves” to become A-named businesses and jump up the telephone list. Writer Richard Wiseman conducted a survey for the UK newspaper The Telegraph to see how people’s surnames impacted their perception of their success in life. Readers with names at the beginning of the alphabet rated themselves as significantly more successful, particularly at work, than those at the end of the alphabet. Business professors Kurt A. Carlson and Jacqueline M. Conard discov-ered that people who grow up with names at the end of the alphabet have a much more Pavlovian response to deals than their earlier-alphabetted peers. Presented with an enticing sale or potential prize, R–Zs will leap at the opportunity, while Andersons and Bennetts will be more laissez-faire. Economists Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv analyzed the surnames of academics in the top thirty-five economics departments in the United States: faculty with surnames near the top of the alphabet are signifi-From The New England Primer, 1810. Courtesy of University of Delaware Library Special Collections156 adrienne raphel cantly more likely to receive tenure, to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. (Sorry, Richard Zeckhauser.) A major part of the problem comes from the conven-tion in economics of listing authors for academic papers in alphabetical order—when Einav and Yariv looked at professors in psychology, where authors are listed by amount of con-tribution to the study, the alphabe-tism lessens. In 2004, Tom Zych ran for presi-dent on a platform to end the tyr-anny of alphabetical order: “I spent many years in the back right-hand corner of classrooms, at the ends of lines,” he said, and it was time for change.❧What Does “A” Look Like?A can have many colors. “The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated),” writes Vladimir Nabokov, “has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony.”8 Arthur Rimbaud agrees: the begin-ning of “Voyelles,” in which he describes colors for each vowel, is “A noir.” Synesthetic associations are idiosyncratic and immutable. Though Nabokov describes his son’s mauve M as a mix of his own pink M and his wife’s blue M, this is likely coincidence, as synesthetic alphabets tend to be highly individualized. Certain colors, however, are more com-monly associated with certain letters: over a third of true synesthetes report A as red. Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer of Stanford University traced eleven synesthetes’ color-grapheme synesthesia to a set of Fisher-Price refrigerator magnets.9 (The Fisher-Price A is red.) One synesthete in Photograph by Alexander Bradbury8. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage, 1989), 16. 9. NathanWitthoft and Jonathan Winawer, “Synesthetic Colors Determined by Having Colored Refrigerator Magnets in Childhood,” Cortex 42.2 (2006): 175–183.the iowa review 157the study moved to Russia when she was three. Her Cyrillic letters had the same colors as the English letters that looked the most like them. Her synesthetic alphabet is a near-perfect match to Fisher-Price: The only color that is different is “B”: in the woman’s alphabet, B is blue, but Fisher-Price’s B is orange. Upon further investigation, the research-ers learned that the B magnet had gone missing during the woman’s childhood.❧What Does “A” Sound Like?All A’s rise. The concert A wasn’t standardized until well into the nine-teenth century. In the Middle Ages, an A could be played as high as 567 Hz and as low as A = 377 Hz. Handel favored A = 423 Hz; Mozart preferred A = 422 Hz. A higher pitch creates a brighter, more brilliant sound, so the A kept going up and up: a 1720 pitch pipe gives A = 380 Hz, but an organ in Bach’s time gives A = 480 Hz. But the A can’t rise forever. An A that’s too high makes music harder and harder to sing. In 1859, to end the arms’ race of rising pitches, the French government set A = 435 Hz as the legal standard. In 1896, the London Philharmonic Society reasoned that the French had set the pitch in a room that was 59° F, and they squeaked out a slightly brighter standard of A = 439 Hz at 68° F. Finally, in 1939, an international con-ference set the standard at A = 440 Hz. The BBC began broadcasting an electronic A = 440 Hz tuning note; orchestras were urged to tune to the tone instead of to the oboe. Today, the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra tune to A = 442 Hz. (The A above middle C is an ‘a’ in the British system of pitch designation and ‘A4’ in the American system. A4 paper is 210 mm by 297 mm, or 8.27 by 11.7 in.)Kenny Ning, a data analyst for Spotify, analyzed all thirty million songs in the site’s database. Of the twenty-four possible key signatures, A major is the fourth most popular, comprising 6.1% of Spotify’s tracks. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is in A major; so are the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna,” U2’s “Beautiful Day,” Schubert’s “Trout Quintet,” and Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto,” his final instrumental piece. A minor is the most major minor; with 4.8% of the songs, it’s the most popular of the minors, which tend Capital A, Times New Roman font158 adrienne raphel to lag behind major keys. G major is the most popular, followed by C major: G is easy for both a guitar and a piano to play. A major’s relative minor, F# minor, is more obscure than the relative minors for the other top major keys. (The relative minor key signature has the same number of sharps and flats as its relative major.) But F# minor is trickier than most keys to play on guitar, because it involves a lot of complex barre chords. So the key signatures that get popular often have less to do with tonal color for the listener than with ease of play.“Take the ‘A’ Train,” the signature song of the Duke Ellington orches-tra, is in C major. Billy Strayhorn composed the tune in 1939, inspired when Ellington gave him directions to his house by subway that began, “Take the A Train.” The A train, which opened in 1932, isn’t the oldest train in Manhattan, but it’s the oldest public train, and it’s the longest, running thirty-one miles from northern Manhattan to Far Rockaway, Queens. According to New York City Transit, it’s the longest subway line in the world.❧“A” Is for MeI’m not unbiased. For me, of course, A is for Adrienne. I have an “A” name because I’m named after my great-uncle Arnie, who died before I was born. Arnie was seventeen years younger than his brother, my grandfather, and thirteen years older than my father, but he and my grandfather had nearly identical voices, and used to play pranks on the phone, calling their mother without telling her who was on the line. On a fairly routine day in the middle of August, 1988, Arnie, who was the American ambassador to Pakistan, boarded a plane with Pakistan’s president at the time, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. The plane had a bomb onboard, and everyone was killed. I’ve only used a Ouija board once in my life, around Halloween of 2010. I was in Iowa, and reading a lot of James Merrill, and it was a dark and stormy night. About three or four people gathered around the board, which was from the seventies. After some dithering and wob-bling through the letters, the planchette circled around and around the A. It began to spell my name, then switched to A-R-N-I-E. No one else at the Ouija board knew about my great-uncle. We asked it a few ques-tions, and the planchette swung YES—NO—YES—NO. Are you mak-ing a joke? someone said. H-A-H-A said Arnie.❧the iowa review 159A Is an A Is an AIntoxicated by the promise of the alphabet to say anything, we ask the alphabet to tell us everything. Though linguists have loved to suggest that the language we speak shapes the way we think, their theories quickly bump up against a classic chicken-and-egg scenario: language may shape what we think, but since much of our thinking is done through language, thinking also shapes how we speak. We can go philo-sophically from A to Z, or geographically from A to B, but when we try to define what an A is, asking too many Q’s inevitably turns tautologi-cal: A is an A is an A. The alphabet allows us to say what we mean, and an A means many things, but simply grading ourselves with an A can’t guarantee that we mean what we say, or that what the A says means anything at all. A exists, A exists.

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